6.0.2

Table Of Contents
Upgrading Hosts 9
After you upgrade vCenter Server and vSphere Update Manager, upgrade VMware ESXi 5.x hosts to
ESXi 6.0. You can upgrade ESXi 5.0.x, ESXi 5.1.x, and ESXi 5.5.x hosts directly to ESXi 6.0.
To upgrade hosts, you can use the tools and methods that are described in “Upgrade Options for ESXi 6.0,”
on page 140.
C If you upgrade hosts managed by vCenter Server, you must upgrade to vCenter Server before
you upgrade ESXi. If you do not upgrade in the correct order, you can lose data and lose access to servers.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Using vSphere Update Manager to Perform Orchestrated Host Upgrades,” on page 155
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“Installing or Upgrading Hosts by Using a Script,” on page 171
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“Using vSphere Auto Deploy to Reprovision Hosts,” on page 184
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“Upgrading Hosts by Using esxcli Commands,” on page 188
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“Upgrade Hosts Interactively,” on page 200
Using vSphere Update Manager to Perform Orchestrated Host
Upgrades
Orchestrated upgrades allow you to upgrade the objects in your vSphere inventory in a two-step process:
host upgrades, followed by virtual machine upgrades. You can congure the process at the cluster level to
automate more of the process, or you can congure it at the individual host or virtual machine level for
granular control.
For example, you can dene a host upgrade baseline to upgrade an ESXi 5.x host to ESXi 6.0, or you can
dene a virtual machine upgrade baseline to upgrade the VMware Tools and the virtual machine hardware
to the latest version. Use wizard-based workows to rst schedule host upgrades for an entire cluster and
then schedule a virtual machine upgrade for all the virtual machines.
Hosts must have more than 350MB of free space in the /boot partition to support the Update Manager
upgrade process. If the host that you are upgrading does not have more than 350MB of free space in
the /boot partition, use a scripted or interactive upgrade instead.
I After you upgrade your host to ESXi 6.0, you cannot roll back to your version 5.x ESXi
software. Back up your host before you perform an upgrade, so that, if the upgrade or migration fails, you
can restore your 5.x host.
The wizard workows prevent erroneous upgrade sequences. For example, the wizard prevents you from
upgrading virtual machine hardware before you upgrade hosts in a cluster.
VMware, Inc.
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