esxi 5.5 to 6.5 upgrade method

[jprovine7]

what is the easiest way to upgrade your esxi hosts from 5.5 to 6.5? Update manager or a CD/DVD? Is it easy to roll back an upgrade? And how to you rollback an esxi upgrade?

[Devi94]

If you have number of hosts in environment and using custom iso image for upgrade easiest way would be update manger. Below article explains how to revert back.

VMware Knowledge Base

[RajeevVCP4]

Best practice got to first 6.0 then 6.5

Patch can be roll back but if you change build number it can not roll back

Shift+f1

[jprovine7]

I just upgraded my vCenter server to 6.5 from 5.5 so would I still want to go to 6.0 on the esxi servers? What would happen that i would have to roll back to 5.5? The base of my question is whether it is better to use a install disk or the update manager

[Wolken]

I would suggest to check some hints here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/vmware-vsphere-6-5-what-to-be-aware-of-before-upgrade

The article could be useful for upgrade planning to 6.5

[jprovine7]

Concerning unmap, I was under the impression that upgrading your esxi host to 6.5 was not was made the unmap process happen automatically, that you would have to upgrade your virtual file system on your SAN storage

[sjesse]

Not exactly on the SAN storage, the datastores you have are probably vmfs 5, to get unmap to work you need vmfs 6. You will need to provison new datastores and migrate your VMs over, there is no upgrade process like there was from vmfs 3 to 5