Moving from free ESXI 5.5 to VSphere 7 Essentials Kit

[deltix]

Many years ago I installed free ESXI 5.5 on USB flash drive as boot device and RAID-1 with hot spare for datastore (using raid card) on Supermicro Server with 8 core XEON Cpu and 16GB RAM. It was mo test machine that was turned into production machine. I didn't touch it at all after, it's running flawlessly. I'm thinking to add a second CPU and more memory and buy vSphere 7 Essentials Kit. And boot from SSD. Can I just shut it down, do hardware upgrades, install vSphere 7 on SSD, boot from it and import VMs from datastore? 4 VM total, so it wouldn't be much work to configure it. I hope so. And if I get stuck I can go back and boot from USB flash drive if needed. It is a production server, so I'm trying to minimize downtime. Or there is a way to migrate configuration? I apologize if this was asked before.

[IRIX201110141]

Most likely your hardware is stone aged and not supported by vSphere 7.0 so check the HCL. Maybe is can be run under 6.0/5/7 but keep in mind that 6.0 is already out of support an no patches any more.

Another thing is that you cant upgrade the VMFS to the current version. You will stay with your old Datastore.

Regards,
Joerg

[depping]

Check the VMware Compatibility Guide first for your server, considering the 16GB, it wouldn't surprise me if your platform was not certified for 7.0. But you can always go to 6.7 U3 of course. Also, if you don't have shared storage, and only a single server, you may want to ask yourself why you would buy those licenses if it just works the way it is supposed to work.

[deltix]

I just checked compatibility list for hardware. It's not certified, but hardware is still OK. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Supermicro motherboard, XEON E5-2620V2, LSI Megaraid SAS 9271-8I, 3x3TB SAS drives. I'm afraid of USB drive that is being used to boot the system will fail. I would feel better if booting from modern SSD. Also, better handling of backups, so I don't have hassle with workarounds I'm using now. I'm OK with datastores being in the old format. At some point in next year or two guest OS will have to be upgraded from so then I can just reformat VMFS and start from scratch. It's light load, one VM is MySQL database, one is smaller file server, one is backup IP phone system (freePBX) and last one is backup firewall (pfSense).

I don't have problem trying 7 and then if it doesn't work just go back and boot from flash drive. I was just asking if procedure will work.