Vcenter confusion

[Miraculous1]

Hi all,

Being fairly new to Vmware;  I have so far found the online forums and help very good, but I have now hit a bit of a brickwall on one matter and I am hoping the hive mind can help me.

I inherited a smallish virtual estate when I joined my current company; 3 HP servers on a HP build of ESXi 6.7. The servers are deployed over 2 physical locations and host a variety of Windows and Linux virtual machines as part of the internal IT set up. There is a server hosting production VMs on each site and one site has as additional server which only hosts replicas VMs which are produced and maintained by the backup software; Nakivo.

All 3 ESXi hosts are effectively standalone, no clustering or fail over was set up.

I built a vcenter appliance and it sites on one server. I attached baselines and scanned the 3 esxi servers and have staged and remediated 2 of them. The Pre-check Remediation report on the last server is moaning about "VMware vCenter Server is installed on the virtual machine and DRS is disabled on the cluster."

So I read up on this and it says about creating a cluster enabling DRS and HA. Which I have done but I get message about datastore conflicts when I try to add the hosts into the cluster etc. I dont want to mess up my vitual environment so I am hoping I might be able to get some advice please.

Thanks

[daphnissov]

If these are standalone hosts, they probably aren't sharing the same storage. vCenter is complaining because it can't remediate the host on which it sits because it can't move itself to another host owing to the fact there is (likely) no shared storage. Also, if these hosts are in separate sites and without shared storage, they don't need to be in a cluster to begin with.

[Miraculous1]

My real question relates more about being able to remediate the host that the vcenter appliance is on. I dont want to try and rollup the version to 6.7 U2 plus whatever patches and kill either the server or the vcenter.

Is it just moaning for the sake of it or should I do something first?

[daphnissov]

As long as your vCenter stays at least as far ahead as the ESXi hosts it manages, you should be fine. But don't try and have a vCenter at, for example, 6.7 U1 and patch your ESXi hosts to 6.7 U2. Follow the interop matrix for the supportability.

[Miraculous1]

thanks I'll give it a go

[Miraculous1]

Sadly this was a complete fail.

The Vcenter was already running 6.7.0.32000 build no. 14070457, but after I performed the remediation and it rebooted the ESXi server that hosts the vcenter appliance is still on 6.7.0 build no. 8169922.

Is there a particular or alternate method that should be followed for this other than kicking it off from vcenter perhaps?

[daphnissov]

You're going to have to be more descriptive here as I'm not following. You remediated an ESXi host (standalone) on which vCenter was running?

[Miraculous1]

Don't worry I'm going to clone the vcenter to a different host server and then remediate the original server.

VMware Knowledge Base

[IRIX201110141]

Just shutdown the vCenter and patch the ESXi Host trough commandline

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20190604001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient

or by using a CD/ISO.

Regards
Joerg