ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 upgrade

ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 upgrade

So after the upgrade and migration of vCenter my next stage was to begin the upgrade of all our ESXi hosts.

This would come in two stages as one of our servers (our backup replication host) can only take upto ESXi 6.0 U3. The 3 production hosts can take the latest version of 6.5.

Also in the event of a disaster if anything happened to this host it would not be the end of the world as we have further backups of all Production VM's to on other storage so it was a good host to begin with.

First steps

First of all I'll take a copy of the config from the host using VMWare CLI

This is done from my management PC and takes the following form;

vicfg-cfgbackup.pl --server=IP OF SERVER --username=root -s c:\Temp\hostname_build_number_backup_date.tgz

Just replace the IP of the server with yours and also I like to include the build number of the current version of ESXi I'm running as you need to have the same version installed if coming to restore.

Once that's complete either migrate all VM's using Vmotion or power them off. In my case I have one VM running on this backup host which can be powered down without any effect on the business. Once done the ESXi host was placed into maintenance mode.

The servers also don't have CD/DVD drives in them so I need to mount the ESXi ISO using HP iLO.

Connect to the iLO of the host and enter the remote console

Open remote console to ESXI host (Launch the Integrated Remote Console), Click on Virtual Drives, then Image File CD-ROM/DVD

Browse to the ISO file for ESXi and click Open

Once mounted reboot the ESXI server

Once the server begins POST and booting up press the required key to start the Boot Menu. On the HP its F11.

Then choose the CD ROM option which will then begin the boot from the ISO process 

Choose to boot the ESXi installer

The installer then begins it’s boot up process

We then are met with the initial startup page

Read and accept the EULA

The installer then scans the system for available installation devices

Here mine has both an SD card and also lots of local storage as this is where our VM replicas reside. You can press F1 on any of them to get more information. Make sure you are installing on to the correct place as this process is destructive.

I’m installing onto the SD card

Pressing F1 tells me it has found the previous 5.5.0 install so I know this is what I want to upgrade

Just to highlight the differences here are the same details on the local disks, you can see it clearly tells you ESXi is not installed here

Pressing Enter on the SD card gives me 2 options to install or upgrade. As I want to keep all the previous config I am upgrading

It then asks to confirm the upgrade

Then the process begins…

This upgrade from the above screenshot to the following one just took 8 minutes, reboot your ESXi host to complete. You must update the license key once back up to the relevant one for your version of ESXi.

Remember to disconnect the ISO before rebooting

 Once rebooted you will see the familiar screen of ESXi complete with your new version number!