Best upgrade path or method for upgrading ESXi 5.5 on 4GB SD card to 6.5?

[aj800]

A few questions:

1. What is the best way to determine how much space ESXi is currently using when booting and run from an SD Card on a HP server with no local hard drive?

2. VMware says that 1GB minimum is required for installation of ESXi on a SD Card but 5.2GB is recommended for 6.5.  We have a few ESXI hosts running at 5.5 that we're looking to upgrade to 6.5.  Can this be done on the cards we're using?  If not, how do we get from 5.5 to 6.5 on new cards?  Will that require a fresh install/configuration or can the 4GB card be copied to a bigger card and then upgraded without interrupting existing the ESXI configuration?

[sk591]

Hi AJ,

I believe you are referring to: ESXi Hardware Requirements  when you mention the 5.2 GB disk space, however, please make a note of the following mentioned on the same page:

Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices, the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices. When installing or upgrading on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. After the installation or upgrade, you should reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore. Although a 1GB USB or SD device suffices for a minimal installation, you should use a 4GB or larger device. The extra space is used for an expanded coredump partition on the USB/SD device. Use a high-quality USB flash drive of 16 GB or larger so that the extra flash cells can prolong the life of the boot media, but high-quality drives of 4 GB or larger are sufficient to hold the extended coredump partition. See Knowledge Base article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004784.

Please check the SD card compatibility with ESXi 6.5.

Also, proceed with taking a backup of all the VMs hosted via third party backup if possible. In the unlikely event that the upgrade fails and you do not have a way to revert back via altbootbank as well, you can proceed with a clean installation of esxi 6.5. Please refer the following kb to revert to a previous version of ESXi in case of a failed upgrade: VMware Knowledge Base

Kind Regards.