Last week I was looking for a way to bundle VM Hardware Upgrades with our monthly Guest OS patching. After the Guest OS is patched, it gets rebooted. The goal was to get the VMs to upgrade their hardware after the Guest OS is rebooted. And avoid having to power of the VMs to carry out the hardware upgrades.

It appears this is possible by changing the VM UpgradePolicy to “Always” and setting a VersionKey (i.e. the ESX compatibility level) using Powershell.

To prove that changing these VM settings I mentioned above actually triggers a Hardware Upgrade at Guest reboot, I built a test VM, then carried out the steps below.

I’ve simply used the scripts provided in this blog post. https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/09/automating-upgrade-of-vmware-tools-and-vmware-compatibility.html

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