In November, ESXi 6.5 became available to users of the free vSphere Hypervisor.

As a user of ESXi 6.0 and having several failed upgrade attempts already, I was not optimistic about an attempt to upgrade to 6.5.

In addition, I was never able to determine why the upgrades were failing so no way of preventing it happening again!

My ESXi installation is on a USB drive so all I had to do was swap it for a new blank stick (allowing me to instantly go back if it all goes wrong).

After performing a new clean installation of ESXi 6.5, I was up and running within 10 mins. Then another 10 minutes of individually attaching the VMs to the new installation.

All finished and fully upgraded to 6.5.

Until the next upgrade anyway…