By default, the upgrade process upgrades the ESXi hosts in all clusters in a workload domain in parallel. If you have multiple clusters in the management domain or in a VI workload domain, you can select the clusters to upgrade. You can also choose to upgrade the clusters in parallel or sequentially.
If you want to skip any hosts while applying an ESXi update to the management domain or a VI workload domain, you must add these hosts to the application-prod.properties file before you begin the update. See Skip Hosts During ESXi Update.
To perform ESXi upgrades with custom images and async drivers for clusters in a workload domain that uses vLCM baselines, see Upgrade ESXi with Custom ISO or Async Drivers.
If you are using external (non-vSAN) storage, the following procedure updates the ESXi hosts attached to the external storage. However, updating and patching the storage software and drivers is a manual task and falls outside of SDDC Manager lifecycle management. To ensure supportability after an ESXi upgrade, consult the vSphere HCL and your storage vendor.
Prerequisites
- Validate that the ESXi password is valid.
- Download the ESXi bundle. See Downloading Bundles.
- Ensure that the domain for which you want to perform cluster-level upgrade does not have any hosts or clusters in an error state. Resolve the error state or remove the hosts and clusters with errors before proceeding.
