Installing ESXi 7.0.x on VMware workstation failed
While upgrading my current nested ESXi 6.7 server to ESXi version 7.0.0 or higher. The server has an unsupported network adapter and cannot find the existing hard drives. It has been a while that I powered up my test environment en therefore it needs an upgrade to the latest version.
Network adapter not loaded while doing the upgrade:
##NOTE…. Before doing the following steps. make sure that you have a backup of the machine and .vmx file.
Let’s try if I can upgrade my nested server out of the box without any upgrades regarding hardware compatibility in workstation.
No, no it isn’t possible without upgrading or changing the configuration within workstation. Lets try to upgrade hardware compatibility to the newest version for supporting the network adapter “vmxnet3”.
Select the latest hardware compatibility and proceed with the wizard
After doing the upgrade, open the vmx file with an text editor (notepad, notepad++ etc)
change the property “ethernet0.virtualdev” with value “e1000” to “vmxnet3”
After changing the property, you can power on the machine or scroll down to change the disk properties.
Just for this case, I power on the server and as expected the disks are not found.
Disk not found while doing the upgrade
After powering up the machine, the network has been recognized so that is good news! Unfortunately, the disk is not found, and the upgrade cannot proceed.
Let’s go back to the .vmx settings.
Change the property SCSi0.VirtualDev = “LSILogic” to “PVSCSI” and save the .vmx file.
Last check, open the .vmx file again and check if the properties has been changed and saved:
