Prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, users could choose whether to apply an ESX update across all or a selected set of vSphere Clusters, but there was no additional granularity for selecting specific ESX hosts within a cluster. This has been a frequently requested capability, especially for excluding specific ESX hosts from an update or performing a controlled rollout across one or more vSphere Clusters.
Fleet Lifecycle Management in VCF 9.1 has been enhanced with a new custom host selection capability that allows users to select specific ESX hosts within a vSphere Cluster for patching.
During the ESX Configure Upgrade workflow in VCF Operations, you will continue to have the existing option of selecting either all vSphere Clusters or the new Custom Selection option. When the Custom Selection is chosen, a Customize button is enabled for each selected vSphere Cluster.
For the selected vSphere Cluster, you can now choose the specific ESX hosts to include as part of the configured patch plan.
In vSphere 8, when doing updates at the cluster level on the Image Compliance page in the vSphere client, one host can be selected instead of selecting Remediate ALL. On VCF 9.0.2, can the same process from vSphere 8, be followed from the vSphere client connecting to the vCenter at the cluster level without breaking SDDC Inventory/Workflows?
As long as the same vLCM image is used, since that needs to be imported into SDDCm, you can patch using VC and then set desired image in VCF and it should be no-op as hosts are at desired version