Need to upgrade VMWare Esxi hosts from 5.0 to 6.5

[sanmaria]

Hi,

I need to upgrade VMWare Esxi hosts from 5.0 to 6.5 version.

My Hardware is Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Servers and all the blade Servers are in HA in 5.0 Esxi and there are around 50 VMs running on it.

Please guide me step by step process or procedure for doing the above migration with out impacting these 50 VMs.

Looking forward your reply at the earliest.

Regards

Sanjeevi

[vmrale]

Hi,

first of all You can't upgrade ESXi 5.0 to 6.5 directly.

Look at this:

VMware Product Interoperability Matrices

You have to do it to 6.0U2 first and then to 6.5 version.

You have to check the upgrade path for vCenter as well, bacause the correct upgrade order is:

1. vCenter

2. Hosts

3. Vmware Tools

4. Virtual Hardware

[larstr]

Sanjeevi,

The B200M2 was end of sale+end of life in September 2012 and I'm surprised it actually supports ESXi 6.5. But the procedure should be as mentioned above. You will need to upgrade to 5.5 or 6.0 as a part of the upgrade to 6.5. Also keep in mind that you will need to upgrade vcenter before the esxi hosts.

Lars

[sanmaria]

Hi Vmrale,

Thanks for the detailed update.

Regards

Sanjeevi

[sanmaria]

Hi Lar,

Thanks for the detailed update.

You mean to say that B200M2 hardware does not support ESXi 6.5 ??

Looking forward your reply.

Regards

Sanjeevi

[larstr]

Sanjeevi,

It supports ESXi 6.5, but not 6.7.

Lars

[sanmaria]

Hi Lars,

Thanks for the confirmation.

Regards

Sanjeevi

[MikeStoica]

Follow this blog series about upgrading https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/12/the-vsphere-upgrade-blog-series-wrap-up.html

[larstr]

Sanjeevi,

The reason 6.5 is supported is because the server still had hw support when 6.5 was released. These servers are now out of support from Cisco (last day of support was 31st of March 2018). I would plan migrating to newer servers instead of taking the risk of running on unsupported hardware where you will have problems replacing faulted hardware.

End-of-Sale and End-of-Life Announcement for the Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Server - Cisco

Lars

[mgnyinyinaing]

Turn off HA first then upgrade to 6.0 on each. After that try to upgrade to 6.5.

[AnilKumarSingh]

as per the link share by you.. direct upgrade is possible..

Not sure why you are denying that..

Thanks , it would be great if you can explain it little bit more..