topic Re: Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts in VMware vSphere™ Discussions

Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts

CRDP — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 06:22:40 GMT

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.

Re: Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts

Sachchidanand — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 06:48:38 GMT

Please go through the following doc:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vcenter.upgrade.doc/GUID-49E8A38B-A356-4665-8F95-38163FB3A220.html

Regards,

Sachchidanand

Re: Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts

scott28tt — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 07:56:06 GMT

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.

Re: Can VCenter 7 manage ESXi 6.5 hosts

battybishop — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:35:42 GMT

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