Best Esxi ver of 7.x.to use ?.. also ok to have mixed Esxi revs in one vcenter ?

[Douglas42Adams]

Howdy ,

So we are in the midst of the Fun Fun task of killing our Dell SD modules that worked SO awesomely for many years.. but now vmware saw fit to take those away from us 🙂 .. and create an OS that will Kill them.. and thus we are migrating all our 14th gen DELL Servers to BOSS Cards 😛 .

- Any thoughts on what the most stable rev of Esxi 7.x is atm ?.

- Is the upg process from 6.7.0 as simple as just mounting the ISO for 7.x and upgrading ? 🙂 .

- Sorry probably doesnt belong in ESxi .. but we have never had Vcenter clusters w/ Different ESxi revs in them ... anyone have thoughts on that ?.. if its a bad idea ?

The Reason we have to do that .. is we have some 13th generation DELLS that cant handle a boss card.. and boot off of SD modules.. and thus we probably wont bring them to Esxi 7.x ...  We probably wouldnt install a whole RAID system and drives.. we probably would just buy new servers.

Thanks much .

[pmichelli]

We are a Dell shop in the same situation.  Some of my servers were replaced with BOSS cards and run ESXi 7.0.2E

My older FC 430 cluster cannot get rid of the SD cards and we kept it on 7.0.1E

7.0.2 will destroy your SD cards (even the so called patched C build). 

You can mix servers in a cluster on different editions, while not best practice, it is 100% supported

I would steer clear of ESXi 7.0.3 , they have butchered the interface and it seems to have a lot of problems (so many that they actually pulled earlier versions of 7.0.3 from the downloads !!), not to mention some backup vendors still do not support 7.03

My opinion : 

vCenter 7.0.2 latest build

BOSS Cards = 7.0.2 latest build

SD Cards = 7.0.1 latest build

[continuum]

Is ESXi 6.7 no longer supported ? And in case it is not - do you really get support when you need it?
Honestly I just installed 6.7 on Dell hardware for a customer and intend to use it as long as possible.
I would still recommend 5.5 if that version supported newer Windows versions.

Ulli

[pmichelli]

He asked about ESXi 7, not 6.7

Yes 6.7 is fully supported still but was not what he asked. I was only giving him some ideas based on our experience with anything past 7.0.1 destroying SD cards. We killed 16 cards in 2 months across 6 blades.

[continuum]

He asked about an update from 6.7 to 7.
My recommendation was to stick with 6.7

[Douglas42Adams]

Thank you @pmichelli i Greatly appreciate it .

My very recent call to vmware support Swore by U3d...  that it was Just fine . 😛 .

We were also told many times that 7.0.2c was OK for SD cards... thanks a Million for that heads up.. you have saved me many hours .

Do you mind me asking how long the servers w/ the SD cards have had the 7.0.1 E ?   Do they get rebooted at all ?.. May i presume thats when one 'finds out' they are dead ?.. when you reboot ?. as Esxi would be fully in mem yes ? .. or does it just die out right ?

So theres no way to just 'relocate' the swap file that kills the SD cards to a NAS / SAN ?...  i would presume not.. otherwise people just would have done that .

thanks again .

[Douglas42Adams]

Hi @continuum . Thanks for your help / reply !

https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/ looks like from vmwares site ..

6.7.0's end of Support is 2023-11-15...

ALso its end of general support is 2022-10-15 .

Anyone know the difference ?.. MAybe no new Fixes after 10-15-22 ?.. and no support calls on if after 11-15-23 ?

I hear ya on the 6.7.0 ....  Is it ME ?.. or does there not seem to be enough of a 'reason' to upgrade to 7 ?.. the Pain doesnt appear to be worth the Gain to me ... anyone else ?

[Douglas42Adams]

Thanks both @pmichelli and @continuum .

GREATLY appreciate it .

Basically i have a 6.7.0 vcenter w/ all clusters having 6.7.0 as well of course .

Two if the 3 clusters have 14th gen dells so they can handle the boss cards .

We have one cluster w/ 13th gen dells.. thus they oddly can not handle the Boss card's.. and must retain the SD card's.

I was just trying to Plan out a potential upgrade to some flavour of 7.x .

I wasnt sure if i was keeping 6.7.0 on the 13th gen.. or Upgrade it to some flavour of 7.x that wont Kill SD cards ..etc.

Ive never had Different Esxi versions for each Cluster in a Vcenter before.. always had them all the same.. ( whhich sounds like Best Practice of course ) .

Wasnt sure if its best to have All clusters on Some rev of 7.x... ie the 14th gen on 7.0.2 X.. and the the 13th gen on 7.0.1 X... or the 14th gen on 7.0.2.x and the 13th gen on 6.7.0 still .

thanks again for all the help .

[pmichelli]

The old FC430's have been running ESXI 7.0.1 for about a year now.  I have rebooted them a handful of times.

There are some critical things you need to do if you are running these off SD cards, regardless of the version

1: Set the scratch folder to a shared datastore. Do this under advanced options

2: Move the VMware tools to RAMDISK : https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83376

3: Set coredump to a shared datastore : https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2077516

You will absolutely destroy SD cards (even in 7.0.1) if you don't do these 2 things. The VMware tools to RAMDISK is especially important. Reboot after you make the change to have it apply.

We run mixed ESXi under the same vCenter. It is no problem.  Try and keep similar hosts in the same cluster, but it will let you run mixed servers in a same cluster

[Douglas42Adams]

Yikes !.

Thanks @pmichelli !

I would gander that might have taken a while to figure out .

I appreciate you sharing .. so we dont get hit w/ the same issue .

If you dont mind me asking.. was there anything crazy awesome about Esxi 7.x that you guys/gals were wanting ?

It kinda doesnt seem like it's worth the 'pain' atm 😛 . Granted Esxi 6.7.0 going to eventually fall out of support .

thanks again .

[pmichelli]

The ONLY reason I moved from 6.7 to 7.0 was to look into Kubernetes (Tanzu), which we discovered is a complete SaaS service with many moving parts.  VMware wanted way too much money to license it so we dropped it. 

Otherwise I would have stayed with 6.7, 7.x has been somewhat plagued with issues as you're likely aware. Once you figure out how to make it work with your hardware, it has been pretty stable (as long as you never upgrade to the latest version when VMware releases them)

They absolutely butchered ESXi 7.03 so bad they had to pull 2 versions from downloads. I have been working with VMware products since 2003 and have learned the hard way, never go latest release in prod. Especially if you have 3rd party solutions (like Veeam). Everything has to support the versions you are on.  Let other people be the guinea pigs / beta testers for VMware

[tractng]

So we have Dell R840 with the following drives below.  We ended using the SSD drives for the OS installed. We  did not use the Boss controller since I don't like the idea of removing the chassis if needed to replace hardware.  Would that be ok with the SSD drives on this version? 

So far with the version of ESXi (build number 19482537),  I am seeing the Time Sync issue with the host (some are false positive).  I read a solution where to uncheck "enable monitoring events".  Also the configurations on the port group aren't saving (inconsistent).

We are on 6.5 and need to roll out new version on new hardware (one year old already due to supply chain).

ESXi version:

7.0.3

ESXi build number:

19482537

Drives:

403-BCHJ : BOSS controller card + with 2 M.2 Sticks 480GB (RAID 1),FH
400-BEPD : 960GB SSD SAS Mixed Use 12Gbps FIPS-140 512e 2.5in, PM5-V,3 DWPD,

[pmichelli]

I would not run 7.0.3 in production at all. I am still evaluating it in my test lab. There is absolutely no reason to run the very latest build, unless you want to be a non paid beta tester for VMware.

[tractng]

pmichelli,

What version of vCenter/ESXi would you run in production?

TT

[Douglas42Adams]

If you're at 6.5 .. could always upgrade to 6.7.0 ... ?

Here's the lifecycle / EOL / EOS dates .

https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/

Appears 6.7.0 has until Nov of next year before done .

just an idea .

[pmichelli]

I am running 7.0.2D for vCenter and a mix of ESXi 7.0.2e and 7.0.1e across 2 clusters in the same vCenter.  One of my backup vendors still does not support ESXi or vCenter 7.03 , plus to be honest I am in no hurry to upgrade.

Although for ESXi, there is no 7.0.2e or 7.01E ISO . You either need to download 7.02u2A or 7.01u1C and then apply the patch bundles. I am not sure why VMware never released proper ISOs for them. 
If you're already on vCenter 7.x you can build a custom ISO with vLCM and export it to use for new builds. It will save you downloading earlier ISOs then the patch bundles separately

[virtume]

7U3d seems to be the stable version so far. However, I am using the latest 7U3e without any issues. 

The upgrade is straightforward, you can log in to the vCener VAMI console, go to the upgrade section and upgrade directly from the internet. if not, download the upgrade ISO and mount it using the VMRC. use the VAMI console upgrade section for the upgrade, this time select the CD-ROM.