A few days ago I was upgrading vSphere 6.7 to a vSphere 7, and after the vCenter upgrade, I experienced problems with the upgrade of some ESXi hosts using the Custom DellEMC ISO image.
Upon attaching Upgrade Baseline and running Check Compliance it returned status “Incompatible” with error message :
The upgrade has VIBs that are missing dependencies:
QLogic_bootbank_net-qlge_3.0.0.59-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820
QLogic_bootbank_net-qlge_3.0.0.59-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820
Remove the VIBs or use Image Builder to create a custom upgrade ISO image that contains the missing dependencies, and try to upgrade again.
The problem is well known, that Dell EMC PowerEdge servers upgrading from VMware ESXi 6.7 or 6.5 to VMware ESXi 7.0 may fail with vmkapi DependancyError due to drivers that are built with older vmkapi version dependencies which are deprecated from ESXi 7.0.
Please reference VMware article 78389 for the list of affected drivers.
My workaround was to check if those VIBs exist within the ESXi vib list with the following command:
esxcli software vib list | grep qlge
and afterward checked if the impacted drivers are in use using the following commands:
For storage drivers:
esxcli storage core adapter list |grep -i driver_name
For network drivers:
esxcli network nic list |grep -i driver_name
If the command output shows driver(s) in the output, these are IN-USE by the devices on the host, and If the command returns NULL, driver(s) are NOT in use.
Because the impacted drivers were not in use, I removed relevant driver VIBs to proceed with the upgrade.
esxcli software vib list |grep qlge esxcli software vib remove -n net-qlge
Host reboot was needed for VIB removal to be completed.
After affected drivers were successfully removed, an upgrade to vSphere 7 was possible.
Here you can find the links to workarounds suggested by DellEMC and VMware:
Upgrading to ESXi 7.0 from earlier ESXi version fails with vmkapi DependencyError | Dell US
vmkapi version removal and Installing/upgrading implication with ESXi 7.0 (78389) (vmware.com)