Add your blade firmware to a host firmware policy. Add that host firmware policy to the service profile template. If you have your maintenance policy set correctly (acknowledge), then you'll get alerts for all blades affected before the firmware upgrade happens. I've leveraged both Cisco Powertool and VMWare PowerCLI to automate the process. I utilized Powertool to grab each blade with acknowledgement alert. Then loop through each one by use PowerCLI to put that host in maintenance mode, once in maintenance mode, Powertool acknowledges the alert on the blade. I then create a loop that checks the status of the blade in UCS. Once status is Ok, then it loops through checking the status in VMWare (the server may be up and OK in UCS, but the VMware OS is still booting). Once it comes back to "connected" state in VMWware. the script moves to the next ESX host.
