Preparation ESXI 5.5 Upgrade 7.0

[vertica-it]

I inherited an environment where 30-40 machines are running ESXI 5.5 and they are managed by a server running 5.5 aswell.

Just been give a green light and licenses for ESXI 7.0

Current plan is deploy a new vcenter server with 7.0 or 6.5 to be able to manage hosts on 5.5 and 6.5. have no issue with downtime, to upgrade hosts etc. But looking for any tips or guidance.

few questions,

VMs created on 5.5 should work no problem on 6.5 or 7.0 correct?

Teams have hundreds of templates created on 5.5 will these work on 6.5 or 7 ?

[Quickdraw]

I would be looking at the hardware version of the vm. That's where your combatability will be. Older versions should work fine on a newer vcenter. Once you have the vm's moved to the new server and upgraded your hosts, I would update your vm's and templates hardware version. There have been some security vulnerabilities in older versions. I'd also check the combatibility matrix to make sure everything is supported. 

[vertica-it]

Thanks for the quick reply, noted.

I found some hardware upgrade documentation regarding the VMs, nothing on templates thus far.

[scott28tt]

Thread reported, it needs moving to the vSphere upgrade area.

[a_p_]

Just a quick question. Are you going to replace the hosts (hardware) too? Make sure that the ESXi version that you are going to install supports the hardware! See https://www.vmware.com/go/hcl

Also note that the latest vCenter Server version that supports ESXi 5.5 hosts is vCenter Serer 6.5 Update 3, which will go out of support in October.

https://interopmatrix.vmware.com/Interoperability?col=2,&row=1,&isHideGenSupported=false&isHideTechS...

André

[vertica-it]

thanks for info and reply. no plans to replace hardware for now.

Current plan is to go with VCenter Server 6.5 until all hosts running 5.5 are on version 6.5 then will upgrade the Vcenter Server to 7.0

Currently have a few test hosts running 6.5 and 7.0 and It seems our VMs created on 5.5 work fine, however templates I cannot interact with at all it seems. right-clicking the template files gives me no options to deploy/ add to inventory etc.

Anyone have any idea why?