You can customize the upgrade sequence of the hosts, disable certain hosts from the upgrade, or pause the upgrade at various stages of the upgrade process.
All the existing standalone ESXi hosts, vCenter Server managed ESXi hosts, KVM hosts, and bare metal server are grouped in separate host upgrade unit groups by default.
Before you upgrade the hosts, you can select to update the hosts in parallel or serial mode. The maximum limit for a simultaneous upgrade is five host upgrade unit groups and five hosts per group.
You can customize the host upgrade sequence before the upgrade. You can edit a host upgrade unit group to move a host to a different host upgrade unit group that upgrades immediately and another host to a host upgrade unit group that upgrades later. If you have a frequently used host, you can reorder the host upgrade sequence within a host upgrade unit group so it is upgraded first and move the least used host to upgrade last.
Prerequisites
- Verify that ESXi hosts that are part of a disabled DRS cluster or standalone ESXi hosts are placed in maintenance mode.
For ESXi hosts that are part of a fully enabled DRS cluster, if the host is not in maintenance mode, the upgrade coordinator requests the host to be put in maintenance mode. vSphere DRS migrates the VMs to another host in the same cluster during the upgrade and places the host in maintenance mode.
- For ESXi host, for an in-place upgrade you do not need to power off the tenant VMs.
- For a KVM host, for an in-place upgrade you do not need to power off the VMs. For a maintenance mode upgrade, power off the VMs.
- Verify that the transport zone or transport node N-VDS name does not contain spaces.
If there are spaces, create a transport zone with no spaces in the N-VDS name. You must reconfigure all the components that are associated with the old transport zone to use the new transport zone and delete the old transport zone.
- Verify that your vSAN environment is in good health before you use the in-place upgrade mode.
See the Place a Host in Maintenance Mode section of the vSphere Resource Management guide.
Procedure
What to do next
Determine whether to add, edit, or delete host upgrade unit groups or to upgrade host upgrade unit groups. See Manage Host Upgrade Unit Groups or Upgrade Hosts.