Correct upgrade path for ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 and beyond.

[RainbowShooter]

Hi, I have a fairly stock Gen 8 G1610T with B120i currently on ESXi 6.5.0 (Build 5310538) from HPE-ESXi-6.5.0-iso-650.10.1.0.47. I haven't really touched it since the original installation and it's probably time for some updates! 

 

What's the current/best upgrade path to bring everything up to date? The HP images on here look like they've stopped supporting the Gen 8 for anything past 6.5 U2. Is there anything else I should consider at the same time as updating? 

[Paulwarwicker]

I have just done this myself. Collective wisdom is to upgrade to 6.5 U1 and then apply the 6.7 bundle separately. The  Gen9 bundle seems to work, for now at least.

If you have RAID volumes you may have to downgrade one driver to get any sensible performance.

I don't have any RAID, instead I use 4x individual drives (2x 4GB WD Reds plus an Intel and Samsung SSD). I found that if I downgraded like others recommended then the performance really tanked and just froze after a period of running. So I am just sticking with the VMware native drivers for now. The VM performance is acceptable but not stellar despite raw dd commands showing quite poor performance from the ESXi cli.

 

 

-paul

[RainbowShooter]

That's really helpful, thank you Paul. 

[Paulwarwicker]

I also uploaded the bundle via ftp because I kept running into disk space issues if I downloaded directly.

 

I used this command to upgrade:

 

esxcli software profile update -p HPE-ESXi-6.7.0-Update1-Gen9plus-670.U1.10.3.5.12 -d file:/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/patches/VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-Update1-10302608-HPE-Gen9plus-670.U1.10.3.5.12-Oct2018-depot.zip

 

I would strongly recommend taking a backup though if you boot from a USB stick. Countless times I have had to reinstall whilst experimenting.

 

-paul