Veeam 12 w/ VSphere 6.5 + ESXi 5.5?

[cketcham]

I see ESXi 5.5 is dropped from the supported hypervisor list in the release notes for v12. I know ESXi 5.5 is old af but here is my current situation. Our main datacenter is stuck on 5.5 because anything above that doesn't work on the old servers we have so we are sadly stuck there. We are managing them with VCenter 6.5 however as we do have a few other hosts that are 6.5 in the same datacenter. We have a bunch of machines in Azure too that we are about to flip over to using Veeam to backup instead of the native Azure backup. I have migrated our ESXi 5.5 VM backups all to Veeam 11 on our new storage and then copying off site to Wasabi cloud. I was waiting for v12 so that we can copy our backups on the Azure data center from the storage blob directly to Wasabi cloud as supposedly that's now supported in v12. Currently we would have to add a large amount of storage to our Veeam server in Azure to do a backup copy from storage blob to that, and then from there to Wasabi. So anyway, is there a chance that Veeam v12 will work with our large ESXi 5.5 on prem environment since we are managing with VCenter 6.5 or no? If not that sucks, and any ideas of how we can go ahead and use v12 somehow for Azure only without redoing everything? We will be migrating off this old ESXi 5.5 environment starting 4th quarter this year finally but I kind of can't wait that long to finish up this backup project, it needs to be finished by end of March. Any suggestions or help I would appreciate it, thanks!

[veremin]

So anyway, is there a chance that Veeam v12 will work with our large ESXi 5.5 on prem environment since we are managing with VCenter 6.5 or no?

ESXi 5.5 (even if managed by vCenter 6.5) is not supported by v12, so this will not work. Thanks!

[cketcham]

Well shoot, thanks for the info!

[GabesVirtualWorld]

What is the reason your old servers aren't being replaced? Which type are they? You might want to test on the old host with 6.5. Hardware not being on the VMware HCL just means the vendor decided not to test that hardware against a specific ESXi version. You'd have to decide what is worse, running unsupported hardware or unsupported backup. Depending on the importance of the applications running on 5.5, you might get away with an occasional extra outage should a host fail. But not being able to backup might be a bigger issue.

Would running two VEEAM Backup Servers not be another option? One at V11 until the end of the year and one already at V12?

[TimInKent]

If you need to provide a reason to management for replacing your old hardware, you can reference these CVEs:
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerabilit ... i-5.5.html

Further, there are likely additional CVEs for the hardware. Out of support hardware doesn't get patched for vulnerabilities. Think full control of your systems without any previous admin access like this:
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/do ... 03844348-1
"The vulnerability could allow authentication bypass."

If your company thinks they are going to save money by keeping hardware past the support date, they may soon find they can't access their systems at all anymore... or that the rest of the world can.

[KiwiBruce]

What sort of old gear have you got?
We have managed to get v7 on some 8 year old HP DL380's

VCSA is 7.0.3 Build: 20990077

Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 7.0.3, 20328353
Model: ProLiant DL380 Gen9

I use the info from here: https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ESXi-7.0.0.html
# Cut and paste these commands into an ESXi shell to update your host with this Imageprofile
# See the Help page for more instructions
#
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-7.0U3j-21053776-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/ ... -index.xml
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r httpClient
#
# Reboot to complete the upgrade

I've also gotten past hardware incompatibility complaints with adding --no-hardware-warning.
Hope that helps

[Nas]

I can backup ESX5.5 VM that was managed by vCenter 6.5/6.0 using Veeam v12.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... astructure