Very cool. Thanks for being the first and showing the steps. I'm currently in 7.0u3c and have ESXi on a small 80GB Intel enterprise ssd and it's using only a very small portion of the ssd. The rest is just a small datastore i use for storing various .iso for guest OS installations. When i upgrade much later to v8u1 or u2 I'm thinking of installing onto a SataDOM to free up a drivebay, and because i think it would be interesting (never used satadom before). I've recently completed setting up for creating guests with a vTPM in vcsa 7 by creating a native KMS in vcsa. I did that specifically so i can install win11 guests which requires aTPM. I don't have a physical TPM module on the esxi host motherboard. Question for you, regarding physical TPM module... Would you highly recommend a TPM even for home lab? They are meant for storing certificates, key pairs and credentials instead of on HDD or other storage, is that correct? thank you, and thanks for the videos! 👍
Thanks for all the great feedback Benny T. ! I think you’ll be my go to person voir TPM by the sounds of it. :) I’ve been ordering servers with TPM chips for a long time expecting something like what happened. I’m not completely sold on the idea as things can and will go wrong at times. If you can get the MB with a TPM you may as well just right in and future proof as best as we can. You might want to run Windows 2025 right on the hardware in a few years… I have a Windows 2022 on ESXi 8.0 video coming soon.
thanks for the useful video, very appreciated. quick question: is the procedure the same if I have to upgrade from one version of ESXi to the newer one ? Should I simply install the new version over the existing one after checking compatibility of ESxi and drivers? My environment is a 2 node cluster with a SAN (2x Poweredge R7525 and Power Vault ME5024)
Short answer is yes. I would do incremental upgrades if going from too far back. For example, if you're on 6.0, put the latest 6.0 build and then jump to 6.5. This is document at VMware as some patches were giving issues during upgrades.
I'm attempting to boot to the Dell ISO acquired from the VMware downloads section. It is a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit formatted FAT32 and the server will not boot to it from the one-time UEFI boot menu. Do I have a formatting issue?
In general I recommend waiting until the first major patch to switch to a new version (8 in this case). Why? Apart from the obvious "new bugs" you may find that software or other systems may have issues with the new version. For example, if you use Veeam you had to wait for the new version for it to work with vSphere ESXi 8.0. I have 8 in the lab it seems solid thus far.
Use the compatibly charts. It won’t work if the server is too old. In some cases the drivers have been “dropped” so some things will it work. There are videos on how to try to get them to work (bypass hardware checks) but I wouldn’t do that in production ever.
To the best of my recollection NO. VMware has an excellent table that shows what is supported by server. You will find that 8 does not support the processors, for one. In some cases you can find workarounds, but the R610 is probably too old to allow that to run properly if at all. Let me know if you manage to find a way to do it.
I haven't tried that or looked that up. Use the compatibility page to see if your processors (and the system) is compatible to 8.0. The R650 and R640 run 8 no problem. The R660 should be released soon if I understand it correctly.
The R630 is fairly old by by now. ESXi 8 requires a Xeon v4 system (13th gen) system or later. VMware has a compatibility chart that shows if all the compenents you have work or not.
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Very cool. Thanks for being the first and showing the steps. I'm currently in 7.0u3c and have ESXi on a small 80GB Intel enterprise ssd and it's using only a very small portion of the ssd. The rest is just a small datastore i use for storing various .iso for guest OS installations.
When i upgrade much later to v8u1 or u2 I'm thinking of installing onto a SataDOM to free up a drivebay, and because i think it would be interesting (never used satadom before).
I've recently completed setting up for creating guests with a vTPM in vcsa 7 by creating a native KMS in vcsa. I did that specifically so i can install win11 guests which requires aTPM. I don't have a physical TPM module on the esxi host motherboard.
Question for you, regarding physical TPM module...
Would you highly recommend a TPM even for home lab? They are meant for storing certificates, key pairs and credentials instead of on HDD or other storage, is that correct?
thank you, and thanks for the videos! 👍
Thanks for all the great feedback Benny T. ! I think you’ll be my go to person voir TPM by the sounds of it. :) I’ve been ordering servers with TPM chips for a long time expecting something like what happened. I’m not completely sold on the idea as things can and will go wrong at times. If you can get the MB with a TPM you may as well just right in and future proof as best as we can. You might want to run Windows 2025 right on the hardware in a few years… I have a Windows 2022 on ESXi 8.0 video coming soon.
thanks for the useful video, very appreciated. quick question: is the procedure the same if I have to upgrade from one version of ESXi to the newer one ? Should I simply install the new version over the existing one after checking compatibility of ESxi and drivers? My environment is a 2 node cluster with a SAN (2x Poweredge R7525 and Power Vault ME5024)
Short answer is yes. I would do incremental upgrades if going from too far back. For example, if you're on 6.0, put the latest 6.0 build and then jump to 6.5. This is document at VMware as some patches were giving issues during upgrades.
I'm attempting to boot to the Dell ISO acquired from the VMware downloads section. It is a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit formatted FAT32 and the server will not boot to it from the one-time UEFI boot menu. Do I have a formatting issue?
It certainly sounds like a formatting issue. Try using Rufus to burn the ISO. That’s what I use.
I’m wondering should I run 8.0 or 7.0 for my R630. Thank you!
In general I recommend waiting until the first major patch to switch to a new version (8 in this case). Why? Apart from the obvious "new bugs" you may find that software or other systems may have issues with the new version. For example, if you use Veeam you had to wait for the new version for it to work with vSphere ESXi 8.0. I have 8 in the lab it seems solid thus far.
Hello does VMware Esxi 8.0 work on the PowerEdge R720?
Use the compatibly charts. It won’t work if the server is too old. In some cases the drivers have been “dropped” so some things will it work. There are videos on how to try to get them to work (bypass hardware checks) but I wouldn’t do that in production ever.
Great video, does anyone know if it is possible to get VMware vSphere ESXi 8 on a dell Poweredge r610?
I wouldn’t bother personally at this point. Try one of the other Hypervisors.
I wanted to know if I can VMware ESXi 8.0 Install dell t610
To the best of my recollection NO. VMware has an excellent table that shows what is supported by server. You will find that 8 does not support the processors, for one. In some cases you can find workarounds, but the R610 is probably too old to allow that to run properly if at all. Let me know if you manage to find a way to do it.
So instead of using the USB/SD card, would you use the drives that come with the poweredge? Does iDRAC allow you to partition out the space?
Yes, of course you can use the SSD or HDs. VMware will partition it automatically at install.
Hi thanks for the video! I’m wondering if old R630 powerEdge server can run EXSI 8.0?
I haven't tried that or looked that up. Use the compatibility page to see if your processors (and the system) is compatible to 8.0. The R650 and R640 run 8 no problem. The R660 should be released soon if I understand it correctly.
No. You can't run ESXi 8 on an R630 server. @looper6120
Will it run on a R630 server
The R630 is fairly old by by now. ESXi 8 requires a Xeon v4 system (13th gen) system or later. VMware has a compatibility chart that shows if all the compenents you have work or not.