I am working with a Managed Services IT Provider, and we are trying to determine the most efficient method of applying patches and updates to VMWare ESXi servers, and VCenter servers and appliances. As of now, we manually apply updates to each server, but with hundreds and possibly thousands of servers at our various customers throughout the world, doing so in a timely manner is nearly impossible.
Does VMWare have a solution for managed service providers to allow this to happen in an efficient manner? What is the best way for us to go about this, for all of our customers, without taking up a tremendous amount of time, and also allowing for this to happen on a routine basis, so our customer's VMWare servers are regularly patched?