Tried to upgrade a standalone ESXi 5.1 to 6.5U1 (both local and external datastores)
First of all... I backuped everything... and made even sure I got a staged copy offline.
Booting off from the ISO, the installation reported no ESXi installed on any of the partitions it could find.
Ok, fine, let me reboot (without me accepting any writing to disk being done).
After booting the server reported:
BANK5: Invalid update counter
BANK6: not a VMware boot disk
No hypervisor found.
I googled it and found that it could be a faulty USB stick (well here actually an SD card), so I inserted it into a laptop, and it asked me if I wanted to format the disk. No.
I managed to copy a stage.tgz file from the SD card, and earlier, I made a copy of the ESXi, so I also go a configbundlexxx.tgz (or I actually forgot the backup default file name...
I imaged the SD card into a new USB-stick (I thought I could be lucky that it would boot the stick this way, but no...
Well, I ran the 6.5 installer, and I hoped that it could find the 5.1 installation and upgrade this, but no... so I reinstalled a fresh 6.5 (this is maybe what I did wrong instead of installing 5.1), and I hoped that I could restore at least one of the backup configurations, I got...
But no... after a reboot the server came up with a fresh 6.5 and I it did not accept "vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/restore_config /tmp/configBundle.tgz". I haven't tried doing:
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=20430...
But this seems not to be for 6.5 - I do have the stage.tgz from the original setup though, but there was not time to try it out.
Now, the server is running 6.5, and I succeeded importing the most important VM's (so that people kan work... but it is only a singe network. I need all my configutation... I need network, iSCSI... everything...
Instead of setting everything up again, I would rather be able to use one of the config files I got...
What is the correct approach in my case? Will I be able to use a 5.1 backup on a 6.5 setup (same hardware)
Regards, Lars.
