Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts

[CRDP]

Good day

According to the VMware product interoperability matrix vcenter 7 cannot manage esxi 6.5 hosts. Just want to make sure this is in fact a true result on the matrix if anyone can please advise?

Client is running 1 vcenter instance which manages Vmware cluster at Prod and DR site.

Client wants to upgrade hosts at Prod site to VMware 7 as the hardware at the prod site is supported for VMware 7, but at the DR site the hardware is only supported for VMware 6.5 so the hosts there will not be able to be upgraded.

I also foresee some issues when migration a VM between ESXi 7 host to a ESXi 6.5 host with the hardware compatibility differences.

Any advise/feedback will be much appreciated.

[Sachchidanand]

Please go through the following doc:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vcenter.upgrade.doc/GUID-49E8A38B-A356-4665...

Regards,

Sachchidanand

[scott28tt]

Deselect the Past End of General Support option (since 6.5 is no longer supported) and you'll see that vCenter Server 7 can manage ESXi 6.5.

[battybishop · Accepted solution]

vCenter 7 should support ESXi 6.5 hosts however you have to be very careful if you upgrade the VM compatibility level otherwise you won;t be able to run those VM's on a 6.5 cluster.

I would strongly discourage using 6.5 for DR as it's out of support and will cause problems with compatibility in the future especially when 7.0 goes EOL on 02 Apr 2025.

Best practice would be running the same version of vSphere on both prod & DR and I would also recommend having a separate vCenter for DR