#Vcenter 6.5 supported esxi versions upgrade#
Recent versions (vSphere 6.5 and 6.7) include new and enhanced capabilities that more than make the upgrade a trip worth taking. Avoiding concerns like those is incentive enough to pursue an upgrade – but it’s not the only reason. Once that happens, organizations that haven’t moved to a more modern alternative will be left to carry on without the benefit of security patches or performances fixes. When is possible, we should avoid such configuration and sometimes it may be better to split clusters for: "old" and "new".On March 12, 2020, VMware will officially conclude support for vSphere 6.0, marking the end of the line for the roughly half-decade old virtualization platform. When we have to build a mixed cluster, probably this cluster also will be unbalanced (CPU, MEM) and calculating Admission Control in earlier vSphere than 6.5 is not automatic. Mixed clusters are supported by VMware and at least temporarily all of us have had it during an upgrade process if hardware refresh is not used. vMotion is supported but we have to enable Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) that simplifies vMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. vSphere 6.x added many new features in HA that are not available in version 5.5. Running mixed ESXi versions in an HA/DRS cluster is supported, however we should avoid it.
#Vcenter 6.5 supported esxi versions install#
VMware Tools is an important component installed on Virtual Machines.
When we have to upgrade HW, we should do it on the older ESXi hosts as we can not choose the hardware version during the HW upgrade. However, an upgrade of HW is not required if new features (e.g. The highest version of virtual hardware compatible for both version of ESXi is HW 10. In case mentioned above, customer have VMs with Hardware (HW) Version 9 (vSphere 5.1) and VMs will be migrated to vSphere 5.5 (HW 10) and vSphere 6.0 (HW 11). Newer ESXi hosts can run virtual machines with an older virtual hardware version but VMs with newer virtual hardware versions cannot be powered on on older versions of ESXi. There are some important points that we should discuss when we have to keep such cluster for a while: ?Įach version of ESXi host provides new version of virtual hardware. As they did not build a cluster based on identical physical servers and two of servers are not supported by vSphere 6.0, it was necessary to build a “mixed cluster" - based on 5.5.x and 6.0.x ESXi hosts. Our customer needed to migrate their vSphere environment from version 5.1 ( caused of End of Support Life) to the latest version supported on their physical infrastructure. I had a discussion with my colleague about mixed version of ESXi hosts.