No ESX 6.7 U3 for gen8 SL230S?

[ServerPains]

I cannot find a way to upgrade from HPE ESXi, 6.7.0, 8169922 to U3 on ProLiant SL230s Gen8.

This is needed to have hardware compatibility with existing VMware ESXi, 6.7.0, 14320388.

Anyone have any leads, suggestions, links or is there simply no upgrade path?

[PatrickLong]

To my knowledge, no HP Gen8 server is officially supported by VMware to run anything newer than ESXi 6.5 U3  per the VMware HCL, your particular server SL230s Gen8 included.

This is not to say that 6.7 would not work or could not be made to work with some degree of tweaking, only that there is no HPE-provided custom install media and you will be in an unsupported configuration if you create your own custom iso to include all appropriate drivers, etc..  I would not attempt it if this server is anything but a lab environment that you can afford to experiment with and rebuild.

From the HPE custom ESXi  .iso site,  the last Pre-Gen9 custom image is ESXi 6.5 U3 Dec 2019 (and obviously patch with all available critical, non-critical, and security patches from both VMware and HP via VUM or vLCM after that.)

Note that the general support period for vSphere 6.5 was extended through 10/15/2022, but your G8 hardware is quickly becoming obsolete as a supported vSphere host and you should be looking at replacing these under your hardware lifecycle in the near future.

[ServerPains]

Hi,

I have VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922 (VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-depot-offline-bundle) running on these but would need U3 to be hardware comatible with the other non HPE hosts. Cannot justify new hardware, it's a development environment and need to use these for as long as possible in this current and unknown ecconomy.

[PatrickLong]

I appreciate that you are already running 6.7 on these SL230s hosts, I was just pointing out that there will be no  official HP/HPE-supported upgrade method or pre-packaged bits to get you where you want to be.  Home-brewed solution? Sure.  but there's no downloadeable package from either VMware or HP/HPE that will "just work" to get you there.

I had forgotten to include a link to the HPE Servers Support & Certification Matrices for VMware in my previous comment.  When ESXi 6.7 first came out, I was hopeful that the Gen8 class hardware would be added to the supported list over time - disappointing that never happened - it gives the air of a $$ decision simply to generate new hardware sales.

I wish you good luck - I certainly understand the need to stretch your hardware useful lifecycle to the maximum extent possible.

[ServerPains]

I was just pointing out that I was able to run 6.7 on these.

I went this route without having to build my own. Here is what I did for anyone that comes across this.

I first installed the HPE 6.50 ISO first. 6.5.0 Update 3 (Build 13932383) ISO

I then used the following offline bundle;
# esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922-depot-offline-bundle.zip

This got me to 6.7 but since there is a hardware compatibility difference in versions, not all vmware vms want to copy over easily.