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Roveer
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Enthusiast

A question about upgrading my Dell R710 from 6.0 to 6.7

I've been running a Dell R710 with esxi 6.0 free (dell customized iso) for a few years.  I've got less than 10 VM's running a bunch of os's mostly turned off, for learning and trying new os builds.  

I want to upgrade to Esxi 6.7 (latest build that my R710 will work on?  Please confirm).

I don't mind tearing down the old 6.0 and reinstalling 6.7 from scratch.  I actually prefer it, there were a few things I did during my first build that I would do differently now.  However...  I'd like to maintain my VM's and re-install them into the new 6.7 environment so I don't have to reinstall all the OS's.

What's the best way to go about this?  Can I just export my VM's to OVA files and pull them back into my new ESXI 6.7 once I have it running?  Is there another better way to do it.

I just did some googleing and found if I download the particular vm directory to off-line storage that might be a better way to create my vm backups?  I need some guidance on this.

 

Many thanks.

Roveer

 

 

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stadi13
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Hi @Roveer 

Is ESX installed on the same physical disk as the VMs are running on or did you install ESX on a sd card?

If you choose to upgrade the ESX inplace you can select to preserve the datastore where the vms reside on. You should perform a backup before upgrading the vms with solution like Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition.

Like you mentioned. You should use again a DELL customized VMware image if you had done this before.

Regards Daniel

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Giodomi
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Hello,

checking the vmware matrix the DELL R710 is not compatible with 6.7
https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=server&details=1&keyword=R7...

this wouldn't mean that the 6.7 will not work on it 🙂 I had an r710 in my home lab and it worked pretty fine with 6.7. 
for upgrading, you can also do the in-place upgrade of ESXi directly on the host, using the iso for install and then select upgrade or you can reinstall from scratch. 

for the VMs they should be maintained but better to have an answer from the previous question, so where do these VMS reside? 

Kudos if it was helpful

GioDomi
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Roveer
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Thanks for the replies.

To be honest I can't remember how I installed initially.  I'm going to have to go over the the office and crack open the server to see if I used a usb.  I think it's a distinct possibility that I may have put it on a HDD, but until I see it I won't know.  

I may do an upgrade and if that works decide later if I want to tear it down and re-install.  There were some disk allocation changes I wanted to make.

I'll probably report back once I've done these changes.  Again, thanks for the input.

Roveer

 

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stadi13
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Hi @Roveer 

You can check your boot media on UI under storage. Post a printscreen here if unsure.

Regards

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Roveer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Here's some info from esxi gui.  Looks like I probably have a 32gb usb drive in there.  From the first pic it looks like that is the boot media.  Can someone please confirm.  I've got another server (freenas) sitting on top of the r710 so it's better if I don't have to pull them all apart to verify existence of usb boot device.

Thanks,

Roveer

 

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stadi13
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Yes as partition table shows the "USB device" is your ESX installation. You can check by selecting your VMs on which datastore they reside on. You can also select the datastore tab and check from there. If they reside on other datastore, you are free to reinstall or upgrade you installation.

Again, I recommend to do a backup of your VMs before performing any tasks.

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Roveer
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I set up 2 datastores on physical HDD's and see them in the gui.  I don't see the usb key anyplace which I guess is a good thing.  Guess I did something right when I initially installed.  I think I'll try an in-place upgrade preserving my VM's and then decide from there if I want to tear down and re-install.  I'm not liking how I set up my datastores / raid arrangement and would re-do on a fresh install.  Also, I messed around with some 10gig drivers on the os and see error messages on boot.  I'd like to sort that out.

Question,

If I "download" the VM's (powered off) from the browse datastore part of the gui can I "upload" them into a fresh install and get back to where I am?  I'm unsure of how this works.  I have OVM files for each vm, and the aforementioned "downloaded" directories.  This is not a production system, just a home lab, but I'd like to make certain that I can restore my vm's without having to get into the whole veeam backup solution.

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stadi13
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Hi Roveer,

yes, you can export the VMs and you need the .ofv (which includes the configuration), the .mf file as all .vmdk-files. I still recommend performing a backup. If you do not have the possibility to install Veeam Backup & Replication you should go with the Veeam Agent which is for free. So you can perform an image-level backup of the VMs and you are still able to recover in case of import issues occur. Which are not that rare..

Regards

Daniel

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