MANAGEMENT OF SOFTWARE UPDATES IN A VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT OF A DATACENTER USING DEPENDENCY RELATIONSHIPS

An approach to managing software components in a datacenter having virtualized components includes maintaining a suitable data construct for representing the virtualized elements. In embodiments, virtualized elements include knowledge relating to instantiations of virtual machines. Management of software components includes traversing a data representation of the datacenter, and assessing the compatibility of the software component with components in the datacenter that relate to the target of the software component.