After having a mornings worth of issues troubleshooting an error in vCenter Update Manager, I stumbled across a great blog entry that had the answer.  After we had a server (the server I am trying to patch, ironically) act up and give some VM’s fits, our first reaction was to bring it up to date with patches.  Update Manager wouldn’t do anything but scan hosts for baseline compliance, which makes patching pretty difficult.

First, I restarted the Update Manager service without any change.  Next, I followed the above blogs guidance and unregistered some orphaned VM’s.  Even though the server I was having issues with didn’t have any VM’s on it and was in maintenance mode, this seems to have turned the trick.

Now if I could only find the Update Manger logs in Server 2008…

–Nat