I have old unsupported servers in my lab used for ESXi 8.0.3. In such configuration, you cannot update ESXi by default procedure in GUI.
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| vSphere Cluster Update doesn't allow remediation |
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| ESXi host shows unsupported CPU |
Solution is to allow legacy CPU and update ESXi from shell with esxcli.
Allow legacy CPU
The option allowLegacyCPU is not available in the ESXi GUI (DCUI or vSphere Client). It must be enabled using the ESXi shell or SSH. Bellow are command to allow legacy CPU.
esxcli system settings kernel set -s allowLegacyCPU -v TRUE
You can verify it by command ...
esxcli system settings kernel list | grep allowLegacyCPU
If above procedure fails, the other option is to edit file /bootbank/boot.cfg and add allowLegacyCPU=true to the end of kernelopt line.
In my case, it look like ...
kernelopt=autoPartition=FALSE allowLegacyCPU=true
After modifying /bootbank/boot.cfg, ESXi configuration should be saved to make changes persistent across reboots.
/sbin/auto-backup.sh
Reboot of ESXi is obviously required to make kernel option active.
After reboot, you can follow by standard system update procedure by ESXCLI method as documented below.
ESXi update procedure (ESXCLI method)
- Download appropriate ESXi offline depot. You can find URL of depot in Release Notes of particular ESXi version. You will need Broadcom credentials to download it from Broadcom support site.
- Upload (leveraging Datastore File Browser, scp, winscp, etc.) ESXi offline depot to some Datastore
- in my case /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/TMP
- List profiles in ESXi depot
- esxcli software sources profile list -d /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/TMP/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3d-24585383-depot.zip
- Update ESXi to particular profile with no hardware warning
- esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/vsanDatastore/TMP/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3d-24585383-depot.zip -p ESXi-8.0U3d-24585383-no-tools --no-hardware-warning
- Reboot ESXi
- reboot
Hope this helps other folks in their home labs with unsupported CPUs.
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