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PXA-IDS
Contributor
Contributor

Can't update host due to vSphere presence and can't vMotion

Hey everyone. I hope someone's able to help out with this.

I've inherited an environment that I'm trying to get a lot of overdue maintenance done on. They have two hosts, an HP DL 380 Gen 9 with a Xeon CPU E5-2640 v3 CPU @ 2.60GHz and a DL 380 Gen 10 with a Xeon Silver 4210R CPU @ 2.40GHz. Their environment is running ESXi and vSphere 6.7. Their ESXi hosts are frightfully behind on updates and I'm trying to get them caught up. I managed to get the older host caught up, but I can't do the updates via vSphere to the newer host because that's the host vSphere is present on, hence I can't enter maintenance mode.

Worse still, I can't vMotion vSphere to the other host. It doesn't show up as a valid vMotion target. Based on what I've read, this is likely because the CPUs are too different.

So, I'm a bit stuck here right now. I really want to update this second host but am unsure how to do it without access to vSphere, which I can't move to a host that I can keep running while I update the other one.

I know my way around VMware, but am not a significant expert in it. I'm sure there's a solution to this that I just don't see. Can anyone help me out?

Thanks all!

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

When you say “vSphere” it sounds like you mean the vCenter Server Appliance VM.

 


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PXA-IDS
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, that's correct. Sorry, I should have been clearer on that.

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itdept32435
Contributor
Contributor

I have also inherited an environment which needs updates, however not as many as PXA-IDS appears to have. 🙂 I am patiently waiting an answer to this thread.

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PXA-IDS
Contributor
Contributor

Someone from support is supposed to call me today to do a remote session. I'll post our findings once that happens.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Are the VMs stored on a local datastore, or on shared storage?
In case of shared storage it should work to shutdown the vCenter Server, unregister it from the ESXi host's inventory, and then register it on the other host. If that works, consider to enable EVC for the cluster.

André

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PXA-IDS
Contributor
Contributor

Hey all.

Sorry, meant to update this thread sooner. So yes, the reason I couldn't vMotion vCenter while it was live was because the hosts had different CPUs. But of course, you can't power off vCenter first. What the support rep had me do was clone vCenter to the other host, then using the ESXi consoles, powering off the original and spinning up the clone. This was a perfectly fine workaround that solved my problem. Everything's up-to-date now.

Cheers!

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zenmatrix
Contributor
Contributor

If you do ever get stuck, you can always update via command line, the article looks correct. I have an environment that doesn't have vmotion enabled and I can't move vcenter so always need to do it this way.

 

Command line update ESXi 6 (vfrank.org)