I have a client who has two physical ESXi 5.5 physical hosts that need to be updated to "update 01" and patches that are after "update 01". VMware host 1 contains a vCenter Appliance and host 2 contains a Windows 2012 server which has Update Manager installed. They do not have shared storage and are only on Essentials so there is no vMotion.
Am I able to utilize Update Manager in this configuration or does both the vCenter appliance and the Update Manager VM need to be online the whole time? I was hoping both hosts could be "Staged" and then when time for remediation the actual process would shut the VM's down, put the host in Maintenance Mode then do the installs but I'm not sure that would work if the Update Manager VM was turned off (which is required to update that host).
So bottom line is can I use Update Manager to update one or both of the physical hosts in this scenario?
Thanks for any assistance.