Solved: Update Manager FQDN

As reported earlier, the Update Manager (UM) does not use the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) when it connects to the UM server. The update will therefore fail if you don’t have the UM Server on the same search domain as the ESX(i) servers you are trying to update.

After reading some comments on the net and doing some research, I realized that the UM server no longer sets the PatchDepotUrl variable under HostConfig in vci-integrity.xml. This file is the configuration for the UM server and it located under C:\program files\vmware\Infrastructure\Update Manager if you haven’t modified your installation. By changing, or rather setting the PatchDepotUrl to a path containing the FQDN of the UM server (for example http://winserver.lab.frode.biz/vci/hostupdates/hostupdate) the clients use this url to get updates instead of the default, non-working one with the windows machine name. I seem to remember that it was using the FQDN in Update 1. Anyone know why VMware changed the default behaviour?