Firepower Management Center Virtual VMware 6.5?

[MaxH]

The docs say only VMware vSphere/ESXi 6.0 is supported. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/firepower/compatibility/firepower-compatibility.html

Anyone has any luck or issues on running Firepower on VMware vSphere/ESXi 6.5, though? We really have a need to migrate to VMware 6.5, but this one single VM is preventing us from doing so. Just wondering if anyone is running Firepower already on a VMware 6.5 setup? Our current Firepower VMware version is 6.1.0.6. 

Thanks for any info!

[#Mat · Accepted solution]

Hi! My experience with deploy vFMC on ESXi 6.5 was a headache.... after a few hours of having running FMC, I had to reinstall it on ESXi 6.0 because the CPU it was on 100% all times...

TAC says it will be supported by the 6.2.3 release.

Regards!

[MaxH]

Ok, thanks very much for the information. We'll hold off then. We're having a ton of issues with 6.0's web client management nightmare that VMware has with the web client. I've contemplated upgrading just vSphere to 6.5 and leaving our ESXi hosts at 6.0. VMware says that 6.5 will still manage 6.0 hosts.

I'm assuming you upgraded both your vSphere center and ESXi hosts to 6.5?

[#Mat]

The customer has two virtual environments, one with VMware ESXi 6.5 and other with VMware ESXi 6.0.

They are moving all VM to 6.5 but for now, FMCv 6.2.2 will be stay install on 6.0 because of the CPU issue.

Regards.-

[MaxH]

Ok, sounds like the issue is then between FMC and the ESXi host, not with vCenter Server. Maybe I'll try what I was thinking and upgrade our vCenter Server to 6.5 to gain VMware's HTML5 web client, but leave the ESXi host cluster at 6.0. FMC would still be running on 6.0 hosts but be managed by vCenter 6.5. Again, appreciate the information.