VMware ESXi 6.7 Upgrade to 7.0 (and 8.0) – Missing dependencies VIBs Error

In this project we had a stack consisting of 3 individual VMware ESXi 5.5 servers. These are the Cisco UCS C240M4S2 model with Intel XEON v3 CPUs. As mentioned earlier, 09/18/2020 was considered End of Support for ESXi 5.5 and so most are now forced to update their environments to the latest version.

First we check via VMware Compatibility Guide if the hardware component, BIOS and OBM are in compatible state, if not we update them, you can find the VMware Compatibility Guide here.

So what happens, when we start upgrading? If you are running VMware ESXi 5.5, you cannot simply upgrade to ESXi 7.0 and higher. There is a certain upgrade path. In this case, we upgrade to ESXi 6.5 first and from there to ESXi 7.0. However, the following error message comes up in the second upgrading step:

As you can see two VIBs are an obstacle in this upgrade and must be removed, these are:

• net-qlge
• scsi-mpt3sas

These two VIBs are most likely from ESXi 5.5 version and are hindering the upgrade from ESXi 6.5 to 7.0, to identify where these two VIBs are we first SSH to the respective ESXi hosts and enter the following commands:

1. We look at the entire VIB list

esxcli software vib list

2. Then we filter by the VIB we are looking for, in this case it is the net-qlge

esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-qlge

3. And last but not least we delete the VIB bundle with the following command

esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-qlge

After we have deleted the VIBs to be removed, we need to restart the host once and the upgrade to ESXi 7.0 will start properly.

I would like to thank my brother in arms Daniel Simelka in this post because of his support.

If you have any questions, please leave it in the comments. 🙂