VMware ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 End of Life - Upgrade Now! - Upgrade Checklist and Considerations

VMware vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 end of general support is rapidly approaching. On October 15, 2022, VMware will be ending general support for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7. Customers need to be considering their upgrades from these vSphere versions to a new version of the vSphere hypervisor, including vSphere 7.0.

What challenges and considerations do organizations need to be thinking about now? What about server hardware upgrades to remain compatible with new vSphere releases? Are supply chain issues being considered? You may want to think about that when considering getting new hardware ordered now. What does the upgrade process look like? Let's take a look at all these topics.



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Introduction to vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 general support end date - 0:00
Looking at the VMware blog post extending support until October 15, 2022 - 1:00
What considerations do you want to make thinking about general support end date - 1:30
Prevented from taking advantage of upgrades to other VMware solutions - 2:30
You don't get the advantages of new features in later versions of vSphere - 3:00
What are the challenges for upgrading from 6.5 and 6.7 to vSphere 7.0 - 3:45
Outdated hardware and hardware refresh cycle - 4:10
Supply chain issues? - 5:00
What if your server hardware is supported for vSphere 7.0? - 5:50
Boot technologies need to be considered when contemplating your vSphere 7.0 upgrade - 6:05
vSphere 7.0 has deprecated support for SDCARDS and other boot technologies - 6:15
Retrofitting supported hardware with supported boot technologies? - 7:00
Upgrading vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 to vSphere 7.0 - 7:20
Concluding thoughts - 7:45

Read my detailed blog post covering many of these considerations here:


VMware resources:

[kevinkirk]

Just inherited someone's VCSA and we're on 7.0.3.

Where would you start with an inherited system?
Just curious and thanks for the video!

[pa]

Hello There. Thank you for the video. We are planning on refreshing our existing hardware with new Lenovo HCI based with VSAN. Current vcenter is running on 6.5 with couple of hosts in a cluster. So can we just upgrade the existing VC to 7 create another new cluster and add the new esxi 7 hosts and migrate the workloads from the existing cluster to the new one? Thank you

[jhunfang]

Hi sir...can I ask you question? Sir how can I recover my VM in the VMWARE VSPHERE 6.5 all of the sudden my VM was all gone status is invalid/unknown and undefine ..this was configure in a raid 5 environment...thank you..much appreciate if you can suggest something..thanks