Upgrading ESXi hosts with placeholder VMs

[RobWindham]

I need to update the ESXi hosts at my recovery site from 6.0 to 6.7. I'm wondering what the best practice is for doing this while maintaining protection on the VMs at my protected site. I can't find an easy way to change the recovery host for protected VMs within the SRM application. I think I can Vmotion the placeholder VMs to another host temporarily while I do the upgrade. But if I do that, will they still be recoverable? 

[Lunceford221]

Vmware has an entire upgrade roadmap what to upgrade first. Follow that one and you should be good. Check the hardware compatibility matrix as well !

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[RobWindham]

The roadmap basically places the ESXi host update as an optional step in the middle of the SRM/Vsphere replication update process, but it doesn't really address my concern. I'm just curious as to what the state of the protected VMs is while a recovery site host is going through an update. It is obviously unlikely that I would need to recover a VM during the updates on the recovery site. But I am just trying to find out if you are basically accepting the risk that protected VMs with placeholders on a host that is being updated will be unrecoverable during the update. I can't find any VMware documentation about this. And I don't know if it's better practice to leave the placeholders on the host while it is updating or if there is any benefit to vMotioning them off prior to the update. 

[JoaquinC · Accepted solution]

The place holder VM can be migrated to another host and your VMs would be still protected, I think by putting your host your host in maintenance mode even the place holder vm will be migrated automatically to another host within the same cluster

[RobWindham]

Perfect, thanks for the info

[mirchu]

Hello RobWindham! You do not need to do all this. Upgrade to an ESXi host .Why doing this on someone else may cause your data to be lost .I am stopping you because I have suffered a lot from doing so There was an app to buy bitcoin in usa web. I upgraded it like this, all its data is gone ... I don't want anyone else to suffer like me.

[Torres112]

When upgrading ESXi hosts, it's generally not necessary to have placeholder VMs running on the hosts. Placeholder VMs are typically used to reserve resources for planned VMs or to ensure that there are no idle resources on the host. However, they are not required for upgrading the ESXi hosts themselves.

To upgrade an ESXi host, you can simply put the host into maintenance mode, which will move all running VMs to other hosts in the cluster or shut them down if there are no other hosts available. Once the host is in maintenance mode, you can perform the upgrade using your preferred method, such as using an upgrade ISO or using vSphere Update Manager.

After the upgrade is complete, you can exit maintenance mode and start any VMs that were shut down during the upgrade process. The upgraded host should be able to run all of your existing VMs without any issues, assuming that there are no compatibility issues with the upgraded version of ESXi.

In summary, placeholder VMs are not necessary for upgrading ESXi hosts, but they can be useful for managing resources on the host. To upgrade an ESXi host, simply put it into maintenance mode, perform the upgrade, and then exit maintenance mode.

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