6.1

Upgrade ESXi Hosts and Their Virtual
Machines 6
Upgrading ESXi hosts and virtual machines is the most time-consuming aspect of this middle phase of a
View upgrade.
This procedure provides an overview of the tasks you must perform during the second and subsequent
maintenance windows. To complete some of these tasks, you might need step-by-step instructions found in
the VMware vSphere Upgrade Guide and the View Administration document.
For details about which versions of View are compatible with which versions of vCenter Server and ESXi,
see the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix at
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php.
IMPORTANT The following table describes which View features depend on specific virtual hardware versions
and therefore might require a virtual machine upgrade.
Table 6‑1. Virtual Hardware Versions Required for Specific Features
Feature Virtual Hardware Version Corresponding vSphere Version
Space-efficient disk format for linked-clone
pools
9 or later vSphere 5.1 or later
VMware
®
Virtual SAN™ datastores, first
version
10 or later vSphere 5.5 Update 1 or later
VMware Virtual SAN datastores, second
version
11 or later vSphere 6.0 or later
VMware Virtual Volumes datastores 11 or later vSphere 6.0 or later
Native NFS snapshot technology (VAAI) 9 or later vSphere 5.1 or later
Virtual shared graphics acceleration 8 or later vSphere 5.0 or later
Virtual dedicated graphics acceleration 9 or later vSphere 5.1 or later
NVIDIA GRID vGPU graphics acceleration 11 or later vSphere 6.0 or later
Prerequisites
n
Complete the procedure described in “Upgrade View Connection Servers in a Replicated Group,” on
page 34.
n
Perform the ESXi upgrade preparation tasks listed in the VMware vSphere Upgrade Guide.
VMware, Inc.
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