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Has anybody else done a migration of vsphere esxi 6.7 (stand alone) upgrade to Vsphere 8.0 update 3) also stand alone which is the first available update for free since Broadcom purchased them?
I tried doing a in-place upgrade with the .iso file i downloaded from Broadcom and it told me it was not able to upgrade vmfs 3.0 to vmfs 5.0 and would need to flatten the volume that has my VM’s running on it.

Several google searches tell me this is a viable upgrade path but i am not having much luck. Has anybody else done this upgrade or did they just abandoned vmware?

I had found another youtube video where this guy did it but he got his downloads from vmware site (offline) installer and the instructions he shown don’t seem to a viable path since his links are all dead and the video is a few years old. The reason behind the upgrade is I need to create a windows 11 virtual machine to do some testing on. My host server has TPM but it cannot be added to the virtual hardware as it seems this was introduced in vmware 7.0 and not the 6.7 version i am running. I seen some other work arounds for this as well but it seems like moving to a newer version of vmware or moving away from vmware is a smarter move.

vmware
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It isn’t, is the short answer.

ESXi 8 does not support VMFS3.

You can try to upgrade the VMFS3 to 5 using commandline, but as always make sure you have solid backups

vmkfstools --upgradevmfs /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>

If your VMFS3 was setup a specific way, it may also fail to upgrade.

Your best, and safest option is to backup, wipe and restore.

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Your best, and safest option is to backup, wipe and restore.

Second that. Backup your VM’s, wipe the host, install V8.3, restore your VM’s.

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A few years ago, I managed the ESXi and upgraded from 6.5 to 6.7, but when it came time to go to 7, we were not comfortable with the hardware in the environment as it was about 10 years old. We had a pending migration to Nutanix so we held off. Sorry I don’t have further info for you.

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How many of you would abandon ship and go to proxmox? I struggle with VMware since they have were bought by Broadcom. I enjoy all the extra features of proxmox such as their backup appliance at no cost. I don’t know if proxmox has been deemed as a enterprise hypervisor.

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For production - depends on your risk level, for a lab - got for it.

I am running proxmox for my lab, after moving form VMware.

It’s going to depend on your hardware and what your VMs are doing.

My hardware for example fully supports 8.0u3 but I moved because of the shenanigans, I still have access to ESXi at work, so wont lose touch with it, plus I have a nested setup too.

It’s just no longer my main OS.

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We don’t have a whole lot running on premise anymore. Most are in a datacenter that is running vmware cloud and being backed up by the datacenter.
We have just a few VM’s running at one location such as a docker container, legacy (sage 100) , lansweeper, and a single terminal server that has a odbc connection setup on it.

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Perhaps it’s a worthwhile time to look at what you still need.

Docker can run almost anywhere, so moving that wont be hard, your lansweeper, if you’ve little left on-prem, does it have a purpose, still?

If your objective is to run a W11 VM (which by the way, requires special licensing, outside of a trial and/or MSDN type setup), why not run that on the cloud too, or a local device with Hyper-V installed?

ESXi 6.7 is long out of support and moving all the VMs to create one new one seems a lot of effort and comes with risks.

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Is it still possible to create and run virtual Windows desktops on Win10? If so, this whole thing can likely be reduced to the bare-minimum or even shut down completely…

As I was typing this, I hit the Windows key and did a quick search. There is indeed built-in Hyper-V so maybe just play around with that on the local box?

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Hyper-V is on Pro and above, if the OP only has home or some other non Pro/Enterprise edition, there is always VMware workstation, VBox or some other hypervisor they can use for testing.

Upgrading a complete host to support a single VM, which if it was intended to be run full-time would require specific (expensive) licenses, seems a little too far.

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Do you have another host ? Coz there might be 2 issues to consider…

  1. Are your host(s) compatible with ESXi 8.x ? I could not find the VMware Compatibility Matrix anymore as the age of some servers running ESXi 6.7 may be too old for ESXi 8.x ?

  2. Are your VMs ready or compatible with ESXi 8.x especially for VMware tools etc ?

So I would rather have a 2nd ESXi 8.0 host then try to migrate the VMs (or import as you do not have vCenter) ?

Then if no issues with the 2nd host (ESXi 8.x) then reinstall the current server instead of upgrading ?

Then lastly do note that there are no licenses available (even for testing) to run Windows 10/11 as a VM unless in a VDI solution (but you may need a whole other bundle of licenses).

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@carlos-holmquist

Any updates on this?

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Yes Rod-IT.. I found out that although they have this listed as a valid upgrade path it is not.
Because of the file structure needed for 8.0 you must do a clean install and not do a inplace upgrade. We had to migrate our VM’s off do a clean install and migrate VM’s back on. Both versions were supported with this specific piece of hardware so a hardware limitation was a non-issue.

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I’m not sure who ‘they’ are but this was noted in my first reply.

Since you have this as a question topic, can you go ahead and mark a best answer to show this is now solved.

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