Best Practices for Major or Minor ESXi operating system upgrades on XC platform

What is a major or minor upgrade?
Major releases generally contain new features and functionality. Major releases may also include significant changes in architecture, deployment, and operations of vSphere and vSphere components including vCenter Server. Each major release has a support lifecycle that is described in the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

Minor releases generally contain new features in functionality but may also focus on enhancing existing capabilities from both technical and user experience perspectives. A minor release inherits its lifecycle from the parent major release. For example, vSphere 7. 0b inherits the same end of sale and end of support dates of the vSphere 7.0 release. For more information about product lifecycle, see the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

Update releases, sometimes called Maintenance releases, generally contain issue fixes, compatibility enhancements, and user experience improvements. Sometimes, update releases may contain minor new features and functionality. An update release inherits its lifecycle from its parent release. For example, vSphere 7 Update 3 inherits the same end of sale and end of support dates as vSphere 7. For more information about product lifecycle, see the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

More information:
See VMware vSphere Upgrade Policies (2149713) at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149713.

VMware ESXi Major and Minor upgrades.

Minor upgrades require manually updating ESXi outside of Nutanix. To quote Nutanix, "You cannot perform upgrades to minor ESXi release versions through Nutanix Prism web console. To perform these upgrades, use the manual procedure that is described in vSphere Administration Guide for Acropolis."
 
Upgrades on the Dell XCs should leverage Dell Customized offline bundle and not the .iso. Upgrades should be done one node at a time, unless ALL VMs are powered off and the grid is offline (as described in vSphere Administration Guide for Acropolis).
 
For information related to Major upgrades, see Hypervisor Upgrade Overview and Requirements.

JSON files are on the Nutanix portal (login required) and clearly identified as "for Dell."  " following the nomenclature: "Dell ESXi #.# A##."   For Example, "Dell ESXi 6.0 A00" is for the Dell Customized ESXi 6.0 version A00 offline bundle available dell support site.

Customer also needs Dell customized ESXi offline bundle from dell support site.
If upgrade is between 6.0 and 6.0U1a, the .json for Dell customized 6.0U1a is not available and the .json available for 6.0 does not work, in such cases must follow minor upgrade. 

If upgrade is going from 5.5 to 6.0U1, posted .json for the Dell customized 6.0U1a is required.

See KB article 176963: Dell EMC Customized Image of VMware ESXi Availability and Download Instructions for VMware ESXi Availability and Download Instructions.

For the latest support matrix for each platform with the last operating system and AOS validated version, see Dell.com/XCSeriesmanuals , select the platform that is needed, select the documentation tab, then select the document.



Dell EMC XC Series Hyper-Converged Appliance Support Matrix
Find the latest AOS version by operating system in the table 'Supported management software.'
Find the latest operating system version that is supported in the table 'Supported hypervisor Oss.'

See dell.com/support website for a newer version validated using service tag.

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