My CPUs are not support in 6.7. Options?

[dbutch1976]

Hi all.

In my home lab I have two servers running Xeon E5540's.  Currently I'm running ESXi 6.5 on the hosts, however I am unable to upgrade to 6.7 because my CPUs are no longer supported.  I have looked at the hardware compatibility list and also at the CPUs available for my hosts (Lenovo D20's) and it appears that there are no CPUs I can upgrade to which are on the hardware compatibility list because all the CPUs are 55xx or 56xx.  This is going to really screw up my ability to learn new vmware technologies with spending lots of money rebuilding a brand new lab.  Do I have any options?  Using Autodeploy I have slipped legacy drivers into the install package previously, and since this is a lab I'm also open to any hacks which might work, but as it stands it looks like a lot of work with a very small chance of success.

Can anyone suggest any options I might not be thinking of?

Thanks.

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

Nope, you'll just have to invest in new hardware. For what it's worth, I'm in the same boat with Dell 610s, and so I'll have to refresh my lab here at some point. It's just life and the business of technology. You can't expect to hold onto decade-old hardware yet install the latest shiny thing on it hoping it works just fine. Just not how this works.

[Dave_the_Wave]

There is absolutely nothing you can do in your power to override ESXi's detection requirements on an install.

This was obviously seen in earler servers with old Xeon MP's that had a ceiling with 3.5 .

Since this is for lab use, perhaps you can try to nest 6.7 inside 6.5 or Workstation?

[dbutch1976]

Yep, that's what I was afraid of.  I guess I'm version locked at ESXi 6.5.  I'm sure I can survive on this until there are some major updates to the Hypervisor, or they release a version of vCenter which is not compatible with Esxi 6.5.  Looks like I'm going to need to spend some money *sigh*.