Reference Guide

Introduction
The purpose of this guide is to assist you with the best possible experience using Life Cycle Manager (LCM) along with the XC
Series 13
th
, 14
th
, and 15
th
generation appliances using an ESXi, AHV, and Hyper-V. This document contains recommendations
and support statements.
LCM is a new framework that was introduced in the Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.0 timeframe.
NOTE: The AOS 4.7.x Branch is not supported.
Dell EMC provides the payload for the XC Series appliance. LCM automates the software and firmware updates for your XC
Series clusters. You can upgrade the LCM framework incrementally as part of your AOS upgrade and it provides integrated
automation of your appliance hardware entity updates. LCM uses iDRAC and industry standard protocols to perform updates
while maintaining your highly available production environment with no perceived end-user downtime.
The goal of LCM is to run cluster-aware hardware entity updates with ease using an automated framework. The framework
eliminates the manual steps necessary to update Dell EMC XC Series appliances and saves hours of an administrator's
valuable time. LCM performs cluster-aware, rolling updates one XC Series appliance at a time. PowerTools Agent (PTAgent)
automatically installs and configures the iDRAC Service Module (iSM) allowing out-of-band iDRAC Lifecycle Controller updates
with no production cluster downtime. LCM provides the following turnkey capabilities:
● Enables automated inventory and update of software and firmware versions of hardware entities in the cluster:
○ BIOS
○ Backplane
○ SAS controllers
○ Network Adapter
○ iDRAC
○ SATADOM (13G)
NOTE: Provided by Nutanix
○ BOSS (14G)
○ SSDs
○ NVME
○ PTAgent
○ ISM
● Schedule and check availability for recent updates automatically
● Live migration of VMs streamlines automation process
● Supports dark sites with LCM locality settings
● Leverages rich standards-based APIs offered by iDRAC Lifecycle Controller (WS-MAN, Redfish, IPMI, and RACADM CLI)
● NCC health check validates the health of a cluster prior to performing the updates
● Prism Tasks tab enables Entity update status
2
8 Introduction