Upgrade VCSA from 6.0 to 6.7 or 7.0 standalone ESXi Host

[josiah75]

I have a vCenter that is running on a stand alone ESXi host.  The reason for this is due to a backup software requirement to work with the vCenter and it is a remote location so the backups aren't pulled across a WAN link.  What is the best method to upgrade the environment from 6.0 to 6.7 or possibly 7.0.  I was thinking shutdown the vCenter / Servers and run firmware updates on the host then run updates on the esxi and possibly deploy a new VCSA or is there a way to upgrad the VCSA on a standalone host?  Thanks for any answers.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

AFAIK there's no requirement for a managed ESXi host, so an upgrade should work just fine.

Note however that a direct upgrade to v7 is only supported from v6.5, and v6.7, so if you want to go with v7 it will require a second upgrade. Also note that v7 requires the host to run at least ESXi 6.5.

So possible steps could be as follows:

1. upgrade the current vCenter Server to vCSA 6.7
2. upgrade the host's firmware
3. upgrade ESXi to version 6,5 or 6.7 (depending on whether your hardware is supported)
4. upgrade vCenter Server to vCSA 7.0 (note that your managed hosts need to be upgraded to at lease v6.5 before doing this)
5. upgrade supported ESXi hosts to v7

André