Buried in the release notes of VMware vCenter 4.1.0 Update 1 is a notice that future releases of VMware Update Manager will drop support for patching virtual machine guest operating systems with operating system patches. Deploying upgrades of VMware Tools will continue to be supported.

The release notes can be found <a href="http://www.configuresoft.net/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vum_41u1_rel_notes.html">here</a>.