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It requires some planning, and it is necessary to check if your hardware is on the HCL for the ESXi 6.5. If yes, then look at the combination of Firmware and Driver version which you’ll need to install, for your particular NIC card(s) or storage controller.
Another consideration would be the fact that your hosts have the exact same hardware configuration, or have the same physical NICs. In this case you can also VMware Update Manger (VUM) to first upgrade the NICs with the proper driver supported in vSphere 6.5.
Step 1: Check your NICs, Storage controllers and other hardware against VMware HCL.
Step 2: Open vSphere web client and select the host/cluster you want to upgrade, click the Go To Admin View button and select the ESXi Image tab > Import ESXi image.
Step 3: Create a baseline.
Step 4: Go back to compliance view > Attach this baseline to your ESXi host (or cluster) > Hit OK Button.
Step 5: Then hit the Remediate button to start the remediate assistant.
And the option where you can save your remediate options for future use.
Add baseline ISO image of 6.5 to VUM , then Scan and attach baseline using VUM and remidiate it to upgrade version directly
The VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) Offline Bundle file is a zip file that allows you to upgrade ESXi hosts via CLI using the images that are part of the bundle.
As I mentioned before, there are various ways that one can upgrade the ESXi hosts depending on the use cases. Now the previous method using Offline Bundle is fine if you have one or two hosts.
If you have many numbers of ESXi hosts in your environment, I recommend using the VMware Update Manager to perform the upgrade of the ESXi hosts.
For this demo, I am using a newly installed VCSA 6.5 to perform the upgrades. VMware Update Manager (VUM) is now part of the VCSA and doesn’t need a separate installation like before.
If you interested in installing the VCSA 6.5, I have written articles for installing the VCSA 6.5 using the installer and also using the vcsa-deploy utility which you can find here and here.
Let us move on to the meat of the topic which is to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using VMware Update Manager. For this, you will need to download the ISO image of the ESXi 6.5 from VMware customer portal.
The first step is to log into the VMware vSphere Web Client using appropriate credentials.
Select the vCenter Server and click on Update Manager >Go to Admin View > Manage > ESXi Images > Import ESXi Image
Select the downloaded ISO image to upload to the VMware Update Manager and click on OK.
Now, click on Host Baselines and select New Baseline.
Provide a Name and Description for the Baseline and select the Baseline Type as Host Upgrade.
Select the ESXi image that was uploaded before.
Review the options selected and click Finish.
Click on Compliance View and select Attach Baseline and select the vSphere6.5GA Baseline that we created in the previous step.
Click on Remediate to perform the Upgrade of the ESXi host.
Once complete, the host will reboot and will be running ESXi 6.5.
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