Upgrading to ESXi 7.0

Upgrading to ESXi 7.0

This post will look at upgrading two ESXi hosts to 7.0.

Note: One of my nested ESXi hosts kept dropping off the network, even during the vCenter upgrade but didn't cause an issue. I found duplicate DNS entries from an old lab I did previously on my Domain Controller so vCenter was getting the wrong IP address, deleted the old entries and that seemed to help. After it dropped a few minutes later I removed and re-added it into vCenter.

So I created an ESXi 7.0 Baseline and attached it to the cluster and ran the remediation pre-check. I just uploaded the full ESXi 7.0 ISO for this baseline.

I clicked remediate and watched it go

First attempt failed as the hosts wouldn't go into maintenance mode. Did that manually and retried.

 So the upgrade went fine and I manually pulled the hosts out of maintenance mode afterwards.

The baseline checks are now all green as there are no patches for 7.0 yet.

That's the hosts done. It will be interesting to see how the Lifecycle Manager works with future 7.0+ patches.

You can even check for vCenter updates from here:

Simples! In my next post I'll call out a few new VM defaults and the new shared VMDK disks that replace RDMs in Windows Failover Clusters....!