Question about restoring ESXi VM's from different hypervisor versions

[superstitch]

Hi Veeam Forums,

I have a scenario where our production environment consists of virtual machines running on two different ESXi hypervisors. One hypervisor is version 6.0.0, and the other is version 8.0.1. The reason we are split is because we are still running VMs with older versions of Windows Server OS on the 6.0.0 hypervisor that will not convert to the 8.0.1 hypervisor.

We use the same Veeam B&R instance to backup both environments.

I am planning a spur-of-the-moment Disaster Recovery solution using decommissioned bare metal hardware that has ESXi 6.0.0 running on it and an external backup repository where I am sending Veeam B&R backup copy jobs to. The plan is in the event we have to use this, I would restore VM's from the backup copy jobs to this ESXi 6.0.0 hypervisor. I don't have much concern about restoring the VM's that were backed up from the original 6.0.0 hypervisor. My question is, will a restore of a VM that lived on the ESXi 8.0.1 hypervisor be successfully restored to this temp ESXi 6.0.0 hypervisor? I suppose I am concerned about newer versions of VMware tools being involved and whether this impacts a restore to an older version of ESXi.

[Mildur]

Hi Brennan

Welcome to the forum.
It depends on the hardware version of the protected VM.
VMs created on ESXi 8.0.1 should have hardware version 20 by default. But your ESXI v6 can only run VMs up to hardware version 11. Therefore a VM restore directly with Veeam wouldn‘t be possible.

As a workaround you may try to export the VMDK disks from the restore point, copy them to the datastore on your ESXi v6.0. Then create a new VM and attach the disk.

To conclude: Make sure the hardware version of the protected VMs are on a compatible level with your v6 ESXi host. Or update the host to v8.
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external ... Id=1003746

Best,
Fabian

[superstitch]

Thanks, Fabian - I sure appreciate your help.