Synchronizing Software Depots

The VMware online depot, the vendor online depots, and the UMDS depot must be synchronized regularly if you want to have the most recent software updates delivered by VMware, partners, and other third-party vendors. Use the vSphere Automation APIs to create a synchronization schedule or to synchronize the added depot immediately.

The Depot Manager does not synchronize immediately the metadata of the newly added online and UMDS depots. If you want to force the synchronization and not wait for the scheduled synchronization to take place, call the sync_Task() method of the com.vmware.esx.settings.Depots interface. You can also define a custom schedule to sync the metadata from the currently configured online or UMDS depots.

To create a custom schedule for checking for new software updates, you must first define the schedule parameters by using the com.vmware.esx.settings.depots.SyncScheduleTypes.Schedule class. Then you can add the schedule to the schedule specification by using the setSchedule(schedule) method of the com.vmware.esx.settings.depots.SyncScheduleTypes.Spec class. Optionally, you can use the schedule specification to add an email to which notifications will be sent and define whether updates will be downloaded automatically. To apply the custom schedule, call the set(spec) method of the com.vmware.esx.settings.depots.SyncSchedule interface.

The default schedule is set to update the metadata daily at a random time. To reset the schedule to the default settings, call the set(spec) of the SyncSchedule interface and pass null as an argument.