ESXi 5.5 to 6.5 upgrade

ESXi 5.5 to 6.5 upgrade

So after running the in place upgrade on our DR host to 6.0 without any real issues it's now time to upgrade our 3 Production ESXi hosts. I'll only blog about the first one as they are all the same hardware and setup so in theory should all act the same.

It's almost identical to my 5.5 to 6.0 blog but this time I ran into a message which may help others out doing a similar upgrade.

So lets make a start, the majority follows the same path as before so I won't go into lots of detail about it if you want to know more visit my last post.

Lets Go!

Save config using VMWare CLI

Migrate all VM’s off Host you want to upgrade

Put Host into maintenance mode

As I am using HP DL360 Gen8 servers we don’t have CD drives in them so I’ll mount the ESXI ISO using iLO 4

Connect to ILO

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

Reboot the ESXi host

Once booting up at the post stage press F11 to enter the boot menu and choose CD/DVD drive

You will then receive a menu option to boot the ESXi installer or boot from Local drive

Choosing the installer gives the following screen

This is then followed by the next screen

You will then be presented with the initial installation page

Accept the EULA

It then scans the storage and comes back with what is available to install ESXi onto

Press F1 to gain further info on the storage

Press enter to continue

Then choose whether to install or upgrade, we will be upgrading

ERROR!  On this occasion I received an error message which I did not get on the DR host which at first worried me a little. 

Basically these 3 hosts we built using a custom HP version of ESXi with additional custom HO drivers etc which the DR host obviously didn't use. 

So what I had to do was go back to the VMWare site and download the HPE ESXi image for the Gen8 hardware and try the process again. Everything else above was done exactly the same but this time I go the following and was able to confirm the upgrade

Press F11 to confirm and then the process begins

Once complete you will see the following screen, again this took less than 10 minutes to complete.

Disconnect the ISO and then reboot the host which will now be on 6.5

Once booted back up you will now see you are on the new version

Once this is all complete when you connect back up to vCenter it may take 5-10 minutes for the Host to connect back up and be visible. If it take longer than that try re-connecting the host.

Now all the Hosts are up to the latest version we can take I'm going to upgrade our VMFS data stores as they have been left on version 3 for some reason. So these can at least be upgraded to version 5 and also the Virtual Machine hardware version can be upgraded to version 11. (Not 12 due to our DR host being on ESXi 6.0)