HP SUM (Smart Update Manager) can be downloaded from http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/service_pack/hpsum/index.aspx. This is just the tool. Its home page is http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/server-software/product-detail.html?oid=5182020. As of this post date the home page says the latest version is 7.3.0 but the download page only has 7.1.0. Not sure why.
I am on Windows so I downloaded the ISO and the ZIP file (which can be found later on in the page). The ISO file is bootable. You can add firmware and drivers to this and boot up. The ZIP file has the HP SUM tool for Windows and Linux and can be extracted to these OSes and run from there. It’s not meant for booting up and deploying.
From Windows computers you can run HP SUM and update Windows, Linux, VMware, HP-UX, iLO, Virtual Connect, etc. From Linux computers you can do all these except Windows.
Documentation can be found at http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/solutions/info-library/index.aspx?cat=smartupdate&subcat=hp_sum.
An SPP (Service Pack for Proliant) is the SUM along with a set of firmware and drivers. As of a certain date. These have been tested to ensure they work well together.
HP SUM only works with VMware if you are using the HP customized version of VMware. These can be found at http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/servers/solutions.html?compURI=1499005#tab=TAB4. If your installation of VMware is not an HP customized version then the inventory step will fail with an error that the username/ password is incorrect.
A baseline is a set of updates that you want all the nodes added into SUM to be at. If you run SUM from an SPP then the baseline that of the SPP – for example 2015.04 if you are running the 2015.04 SPP. SUM creates a baseline from the packages you add to it the first time it runs. In addition to a baseline you can also add extra components (I am not too sure about that, haven’t played with it).
So you create a baseline (or it happens implicitly). You add nodes and do an inventory of the nodes. That tells you what’s present on the system. Then in the next screen you review what needs to be done and deploy accordingly. On this scren you can choose whether reboots happen or should be delayed. You can also see which updates will cause a reboot. In some cases you can even downgrade via this screen.
Some of the components will appear as “Force” or “Disabled”. This means no update is required. If you click on the details link for these components you will usually see that the installed component is already at the version with SUM. If you want you can re-install/ overwrite some of these components. The ones you can overwrite are shown as “Force”; the ones you cannot are shown as “Disabled”. If you toggle “Force” it becomes “Forced”.
SUM can be run via GUI. In this case the GUI is actually run via a web server you have to point to. Or you can run via command-line. The latter gives you more fine control over the process I think.