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ESXi 6.7 U3 upgrade

  • 25 September 2019
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As we have a strict policy in our company to be always at the latest patches for all services, we are required to upgrade to latest version of VMware "ESXi 6.7 U3" which was released last month, we are already running 6.7 U2 now.
we have already upgraded our vCenter to 6.7 U3 which we do not think it has any issues with Nutanix.
But to upgrade ESXi itself we do not know about its compatibility, i know about the case of patching ESXi to a higher patch level than the Nutanix certified ones "which we are regularly doing", but for ESXi 6.7 U3 we are afraid of breaking something or being incompatible, and we do not know either if ESXi U's are considered as patches or different versions according to Nutanix..
I searched over Internet and this forum about anything related to 6.7 U3 compatibility but found nothing, at least if we have a road-map from Nutanix about planned compatible version we can wait till its release.
Thanks
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Best answer by RichardsonPorto 3 October 2019, 11:28

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8 replies

Userlevel 7
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Thanks for sharing @eng_asfour Let me see what I can find for you.
Userlevel 3
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Hi @eng_asfour

According with Nutanix support FAQ, the goal is to qualify major/minor hypervisor releases within 90 days of the software GA release date. The vSphere ESXi 6.7 U3 was released on 08/20/2019 and based on that you should expect the 6.7 U3 appears on compatibility matrix only on second half of November 2019.

Nutanix support FAQ for non-Acropolis hypervisors: https://www.nutanix.com/support-services/product-support/faqs
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From the above URL


Look for the heading:

WHICH NON-ACROPOLIS HYPERVISORS ARE SUPPORTED?


Under which you'll find the following;

"For hypervisor updates:
  • Update/patch Releases (eg. ESXi 6.5a, 6.5d, Windows Server 2016 Build 14393) are supported immediately with the goal to have the latest update qualified within 45 days of the update release date."
,...


Cheers,
Art
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Thanks all for your contributions
But i still have some confusions about ESXi updates, is ESXi 6.5 U3 considered a major or minor upgrade compared to ESXi 6.5 U2 from Nutanix perspective ?

What i am following personally is to check if ESXi 6.5 U2 is officially supported then i upgrade to latest patches within 6.5 U2 "without jumping to ESXi 6.5 U3 branch", is it correct ?

As we are required to be at the latest patch levels at all times "specially security patches" with a monthly security/audit reviews, so we are living in this dilemma regularly 🙂
Userlevel 1
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ESXi U-Releases are referred to as Updates, based on the wording in the link.

So based on this, we support U-Releases immediately.
Userlevel 1
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ESXi U-Releases are referred to as Updates, based on the wording in the link.

So based on this, we support U-Releases immediately.

I know there were some issues before with ESXi U's, one of them about ESXi 6.7 GA/U1 was blocking us from upgrading till resolution in next Nutanix release, find it below:
https://next.nutanix.com/server-virtualization-27/vmware-6-7-gotchas-31973

so that we thought there maybe some certification for these updates from Nutanix before upgrading our Production cluster.
Userlevel 3
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Hi @eng_asfour

As explained before, Nutanix will provide you support, but supported and qualified version are different things... and since on only the qualified version the Nutanix engineering tested the product, we cannot guarantee the same results if you upgrade for a non-qualified versions.

You are correct about some known issues with ESXi U's and this is because VMware made change in some API's that broken workflows from Nutanix side. One known issue for instance if the Field Advisory #58, where VMware made change on ESXi bootloader and affected a lot of workflows from Nutanix side.

To sumarize, if you want to be on safe side regarding Nutanix/ESXi, upgrade only to qualified versions that you can found on Compatibility Matrix list in our portal. But if for your stay on latest patches for security reasons is more important, go to latest ESXi patches and Nutanix will try the best to support you, but without guarantee that it will works the same way it works on qualified versions.
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i saw ESXi 6.7 U3 is available now as a supported version for NX series, so i wanted to update the post for new comers.