As with most IT enthusiasts, I use a homelab for tinkering, troubleshooting and hopefully a bit of learning. My homelab compute consists of a single server with an i7-3770 CPU / 32GB DDR3 RAM / 1TB SSD connected to an Intel BOXDQ77MK motherboard, basically a glorified PC. While my homelab can’t run dozens of virtual machines concurrently, it’s power-efficient, cheap and importantly quiet.
I built the server back in 2013 and to date, the server has been rock solid. At one point the server even hosted this very blog for over 3 years. The version of ESXi is a bit old and overdue for an upgrade so I thought this would be a good opportunity to document the process for anyone else interested in the ESXi upgrade process. Specifically for my case, I’ll be upgrading from VMware ESXi 6.5.0 (build 5969303) to VMware ESXi 6.7 (build 15160138).
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