VMware vCenter Server Appliance update

Here at work we are running VMware. On most of the hosts it  is version 6.7, on some it's 6.5. The reason not to run 6.7 everywhere? Basically it's the hardware which isn't supported by the hardware vendor HPE. But since some time version 7 of VMware vCenter Server and ESXi is out there we wanted to upgrade. From lessons learned in the past I knew to check some stuff first:

• Does the hardware support this version 7? The vCenter Server Applance version 6.7 itself is a VM, running on an ESXi host, which should be able to upgrade to version 7.0. As said before, some of the HPE hardware does support 6.7 and also 7.0 (the HPE Proliant Gen9 servers and higher) but two ESXi servers will remain on 6.5 because the are HPE Proliant Gen8 servers and HPE does not provide a OEM VMware 7.0 image


• The backup software is also an item to check. We are running Veeam Backup & Restore 10 and the latest patch level does support version 7.0 of vCenter Server Appliance and ESXi, older patch levels or version of Veeam B&R won't


• Check the integration with your storage vendor! Mine was a HPE 3Par which didn't cause an issue but you never know!


• Check your cores! When upgrading socket licenses VMware transforms them to new 7.0 licenses but when activating them on a ESXi host you'll see only 32 cores are licensed. If more cores are present you'll have to buy additional core licenses to be compliant. In my case two HPE Proliant Gen10 servers have 36 cores so..

VMware did an awesome job for the migration which went smooth for the vCenter Server Appliance as well for the ESXi hosts, so a big thank you to all the engineers & developers at VMware!