VM hardware version 11 is not supported by destination (5.5)

[davidkillingsworth]

We have a small SMB environment where we have 1 primary production VMware host (version 6.0) with 3 or 4 VM guests on it. We installed this as a replacement for an older server about a year or so ago.

We have veeam backing up the VM guests to a Synology NAS repository and it's been working very well for a long time.

We recently decided to take the old server, put some bigger disks in it, install VMware 5.5 Update 3 on it and use it as a destination for a Veeam replication job of the VM guests on the primary host. We had to install VMware 5.5 Update 3 on the older server because that was the latest version that is supported according to the VMware compatibility matrix.

When we ran the first replication job, pretty quickly this error came up:

Error: VM hardware version 11 is not supported by destination host (version 5.5)

Questions:
1) Is it possible to upgrade to a later version on the older server? It's a Dell PowerEdge T310. I know that it will not be officially supported, but will it work?

2) If we can't install a newer version of VMWare on it, can we install Ubuntu Server and use it as an additional Veeam Backup repository? It's a shame to have a perfectly functioning server, albeit old, just sitting there with brand new disks that we just purchased. I would install Windows server and use it as a Windows server backup repository, but I want to avoid the cost of a Windows server license.

Thanks,
David

[bdufour]

make sure the VM compat version on the VM youre trying to replicate is down to 5.5, not 6.0. basically, if your production is 6.0 it will default to that when u create a new VM (which is version 11), so if youre replicating to a 5.5 host you need to select 5.5. this is your issue im pretty sure.

[csydas]

Hey David,

This VMware article explains your situation: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2007240

You basically have two options:

1. Downgrade the VM hardware (I don't see this as ideal tbh, but you can assess the viability for your shop)
2. Do without replicas and just make yet another backup repo.

If there is no compelling reason for you to be on the hardware version 11 for your critical VMs you want replicated, then personally I don't see why not. It's a bit of a pain though, to be sure, just to get replication going.

Else, toss Debian (or ubuntu if you must) onto that bad-boy, install BTRFS, and get a fantastic repo w/ snapshots set up.