Disabling UAC via GPO

There are four Group Policy settings that you need to configure to effectively disable UAC. They can all be found here:

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options

• User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode (set to Elevate without prompting)
• User Account Control: Detect application installations and prompt for elevation (set to Disabled)
• User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode (set to Disabled)
• User Account Control: Only elevate UIAccess applications that are installed in secure locations (set to Disabled)

Source: Subclassed

Manually Updating VMware vSphere/ESXi (v5.5/6)

One of my recent projects consisted of updating all of our vSphere 5.5 clients, unfortunately, these hosts are not on an Internet accessible network, same with VMware Update Manager (VUM). The easy solution was to download the patches, import them into VUM and go at it. For the majority of hosts, this worked perfectly, for the ones that didn't, I really didn't feel like troubleshooting so I looked at updating them manually. The process is relatively simple, upload the same updates you placed onto VUM onto the local datastore and then run the CLI commands. Since someone already took the time to explain this with more detail, I'll go ahead and link them here:

http://www.vladan.fr/how-to-install-latest-esxi-vmware-patch/