Best Practice to Upgrade 6.0.0 to 6.5 u2 and VMFS5 to VMFS6

[Pollard]

Just really wondering if there's my know issues upgrading a esxi 6.0.0 host to 6.5 and VMFS6. I just did some hardware upgrades on my older server and set it with 6.5 and now I want to do the newer one in production running 6.0 to take advantage of the space reclamation. Just worried about loosing VM's since this is in production and under heavy use. Figuring to be safe I would transfer copies of the important VM's to the older server I just upgraded.

[sjesse]

You just create new vmfs 6 data stores and the storage vmotion them over to the new ones, then delete the old vmfs5 ones when they are done. There isn't a way to upgrade the current ones

[Pollard]

Running the free esxi right now I have the full version in the budget for this year. So upgrading esxi and leaving the datastores wont cause any know issues? Then I figured ill just move the VM's over to different drives as I upgrade each VMFS store.

[sjesse]

Nothing wrong with leaving them, then when you can restart them you can move them to new datastores. vmfs5 is supported in all the current releases.

[Pollard]

Thanks ended up grabbing the full version of vSphere setting up everything now.

[diegodco31 · Accepted solution]

Hi

Check if the following VMware KB article helps:

VMware Knowledge Base

Automating Migration of VMFS-5 to VMFS-6 Datastores - VMware vSphere Blog