Hi everyone,
I apologise if this is a basic question but I had trouble finding any relevant documentation. Simply, what is the best practice for keeping vMA (v5.0+) up-to-date? I'm currently running a vMA 5.0 VM against a vSphere 5.0 infrastructure and understand the VM is a VMware customised SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 system. The "zypper" tool is still present and an OpenSuSe repository is present in the repository list (in fact, it's the only listed repository).
Is it advisable to install updates which the zypper tool detects via the OpenSuSe repository or is this purely for installing additional utilities that some may need but aren't included with vMA itself? Alterantively, should we generally only install the official VMware patches for updating vMA? I'm currently running vMA 5.0 Patch 2 and have never applied any updates via zypper. If I do run it (but don't proceed) I'm informed there are: "289 packages to upgrade, 82 new, 21 to remove, 289 to change vendor, 13 to change arch."
I'm curious to know what is the best approach here and if VMware has any support policy as I don't want to be installing zypper updates if it voids any support from VMware, but at the same time, I run a network with high security requirements so keeping everything up-to-date is desirable.
Thanks in advance!