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ESXi 6.0 Upgrade to 6.7U2

  • 29 August 2019
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I'm trying to upgrade ESXi 6.0 to 6.7U2 but when try to do it from Prism im getting errors on DRS not enabled. Now we don't have DRS license, our cluster is ESXi 6.0 Standard License, is there any way to do the upgrade without the needs of DRS ?
I read few documents that even if i try to use vCenter Update manager update will fail becasue DRS is not enabled. Any workaround solution ?

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Best answer by ddubuque 29 August 2019, 14:01

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One click upgrades require DRS so that machines can vmotion from host to host and isolate the host receiving the upgrade. If you do not have DRS capabilities, you can use VUM to upgrade a host, or upgrade it manually, you will not be able to use one-click upgrades. Keeping in mind, that you will need to vacate the host of vms, and shut down the CVM on that host and then place the host in maintenance mode.

I would always recommend filing a feature request with Nutanix Support for the ability to leverage one-click upgrades with your license type. We have done the same for our 36 ROBO clusters that have licenses that do not include DRS. We have to upgrade 100+ nodes manually and we spend a week plus doing upgrades for hypervisor, firmware, etc... because of this limitation.

If you can sustain the outage, you can shutdown your vms and place all nodes into maintenance mode and kick off the upgrade from VUM of your vcenter is on a different cluster and can still reach the hosts. This would be faster, but would create an outage while the hosts upgrade. You also don't get the peace of mind of only one node going sideways.
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yeah we have the Vcenter running on this Cluster and we can't have all the host down at the same time, im in contact with dell because we got the hardware with them and asking to get some of the nutanix guys to call us and try to assist us on the upgrade...
b ut if i understand correctely i can do trough VUM one host at the time with this procedure

  • transfer all the VM running in that Esxi host to another host in the cluster
  • Shutdown the CVM
  • put the host in manteinance mode
  • run the upgrade with VUM

and then doing the same for the other hosts, correct ?

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Thats pretty much it. You'll want to read through VUM upgrade proceedures and get it configured properly, but at a high level that's the steps. Support will likely be more than happy to assist with the upgrade.

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Thanks @ddubuque 

I’ll wait to chat first with the Nutanix Support, If they can assist will be better 🙂

I know this is a month old, but I can say how I got around this recently.  LCM 2.3 was able to do it without DRS.  It didn’t ask if it was enabled or anything.  Be careful with these upgrades though.  I ran into another bug upgrading from 6.0 to 6.7u2, specifically.  VMware will break it’s own SSH service.  We all know how much Nutanix and CVM’s need that SSH, so it can bring a node to a halt.

SSH service does not respond after upgrading from ESXi 6.x to 6.7 U2