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Downgrade VMware Virtual Machine Hardware Version
You’ve upgraded to the latest version of vCenter Server, ESXi, VMware Tools, and either scheduled the VM Hardware upgrade on the next reboot or you’ve manually upgraded the hardware version for each machine.
Everything has gone according to plan with no issues during the scheduled maintenance. However, after everything has been done, you find that one of your 3rd party solutions no longer works and you find yourself staring at a list of errors. In this example, let’s say it’s your disaster recovery DR solution that’s not compatible.
Don’t worry, I’ll show you a quick way to revert and also point out the way VMware recommends you do it. As you try to figure out why it’s not working, you quickly go through the logs, and you determine that the VM hardware version that you’re running on-prem is not compatible with your DR solution since they are not running the latest version of vSphere within their datacenter.
You do have a few options to rollback and you find VMware KB , but none of them will work for you. The options located in the KB are:. At the bottom of that same KB article, in the “Related Information” section, you’ll find that two other links:.
It’s these links that provide another solution to do a VMware hardware compatibility downgrade for your VMs. Danger: First, I can’t stress this enough. If you are here, that means that the options presented by VMware just won’t do it for you.
Work on one 1 VM first to determine that this will work for you and take a snapshot, a backup of the VM, or an array snapshot before making any changes. Give yourself a way back so that if you make a mistake, you won’t have two issues that you’ll be dealing with instead of just the one. Additional Information: My lab is running:.
The table below shows valid values for the VMs I created in my lab but I went only as far back as being compatible with ESXi version 6. If you want a complete listing of version numbers, you can see this KB article Virtual machine hardware versions.
I was also curious about the VMDK’s ddb. From what I can tell, there’s was no change needed, unless of course, you are migrating the VM to an older environment, that is, some other datacenter that is running an older version of vSphere. In that case, I would recommend that you create a VM in your inventory with whatever native hardware version being run and take note of the VMDK’s version number and match it.
You’ll need to modify the path for your specific datastores. One last thing, I did try to find a PowerShell command to downgrade the version. While there is a built-in command to change the version for a VM, it only works to upgrade to a specific version, not downgrade.
Here’s the command:. As cloud technologies and automation become first-class citizens within IT organizations, he desires to share everything he learns and pass it on to others.
Orange County, Tustin, CA The options located in the KB are: Revert to a snapshot. This is the easiest option but assumes you’ve taken a snapshot in the first place.
You’ll need to install this tool, but there are limitations since you can only change the VM version to 7, 8, 9, 10, or The other thing is that you need to set up a job for each VM that you need to revert back. Create a new virtual machine with the required hardware version and attach the existing disk from the virtual machine. This option can be very time consuming if you have a lot of VMs that need to be reverted back to an older version and prone to mistakes since you have to match up the correct settings for each VM such as vCPU count, memory, number of disks, reservations, etc.
Additional Information: My lab is running: vCenter Server 6. VMware ESXi 6. VMware vSphere 6. Quick Links VMware. About About Me.
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Figure 7 – Using the VMware vCenter Converter to downgrade the hardware version of a VM A third option is to revert to a snapshot taken before the VM hardware was actually upgraded. In my case, this was not an option so you might want to snapshot critical VMs before upgrading, just in replace.meted Reading Time: 7 mins. Jun 18, · Free vmware workstation pro 14 download software at UpdateStar – VMware Workstation is a cross-platform application designed to virtualize a “whole host” of operating systems – from early editions of Windows to Linux to Solaris to NetWare to BSD. Download VMware Fusion 12 and let your Mac run Windows, Linux or Mac OS X Server. Run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting.
Three Ways to Downgrade Virtual Machine Hardware Version – ESX Virtualization
You can verify the current Virtual Machine hardware version from Virtual Machine configuration file. Edit the Virtual machine configuration file Vmname.
Save the. Remove the Virtual Machine from vCenter inventory and register again. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be Social and Share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it. The many problems with implementing Single Sign-On.
Google Analytics 4 GA4 upgrade. The [option] tag is being burninated. Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new Should I explain other people’s code-only answers? Related 6. Hot Network Questions. Snapshot — You can revert back in case you took a snapshot before you upgraded the virtual machine hardware. Well this obviously not work if the VM has already been created in for example vmx and you only want vmx-8…. Convert the VM — with VMware converter you have a possibility to specify which virtual hardware you want for the destination VM.
Easy and without a risk as it’s a cloning operation which does not alter the source disks. Then attach the existing virtual disk to that VM.
Yes it’s supported way, according to this VMware KB article. Then there are some unsupported ways to change the virtual hardware by editing the vmx file, but I won’t list those, as it’s unsupported. For me, the VMware converter works well and it’s a safe method.
The only thing you need to watch out is the network configuration which is not retained, so you have to re-configure the NIC once the VM is up and running.
As we showed in this article, Workstation Player is more for basic virtualization tasks, and Workstation Pro is more for advanced and expert virtualization work with some more powerful features. Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more. Previous Next. You can backup your VMware VMs for free with no feature restriction. About the Author: Luciano Patrao. He has been working with Virtualization for around 15 years mainly VMware.
Specialties are Virtualization, Storage, and Virtual Backups. He is also a blogger and owner of the blog ProVirtualzone.