Upgrading vSphere 6.7 to 7.0 using the Dell custom ISO

Took the plunge today and upgraded my homelab from vSphere 6.7 (Dell custom ISO) to vSphere 7.0 (again, Dell custom ISO).

My first attempted failed due to some dependency problems:

The main take away from this is:

QLC_bootbank_qedf_1.2.24.6-1OEM.600.0.0.2768847
QLC_bootbank_scsi-qedil_1.0.22.0-1OEM.600.0.0.2494585

I booted my node back up and enabled SSH and ran the following:

esxcli software vib list |grep qed

Which provided me a list of packages that included “qed”. I was able to quickly identify the packages with matching version numbers and then remove them:

esxcli software vib remove --vibname=qedf
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=scsi-qedil

After that I was able to reboot and perform the upgrade.

These appear to be QLogic drivers that likely came with the vSphere 6.7 Dell ISO and have since been dropped or replaced on the vSphere 7.o ISO. I don’t use any QLogic hardware in my server so removing them didn’t pose much of a risk to me.