Windows Server 2019 Compatibility For ESXi 6.5 and 6.0

Recently, there was a question from one of my colleagues about the Windows Server 2019 Compatibility for ESXi 6.5 and 6.0. I thought to publish this article in my blog for those who confused and have the same query with regard to Windows Server 2019 compatibility with ESXi 6.x versions.

If you have already tried to deploy the Windows Server 2019 on ESXi 6.0 or 6.5, you might already experienced that the Operating System version is not available to the deployment.

So let’s see how can we find a solution or workaround to this problem

Check Windows Server 2019 Compatibility In VMware Compatibility Guide

Basically, we can check the ESXi or any VMware related versions and it’s compatibility in one of the impressive tool called VMware HCL aka VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide. Yes, I know, You are well aware of this tool and you can use this tool to check the compatibility with Windows Server 2019.

Login to the VMware Compatibility Guide and Select the “Guest OS” option to check the Guest OS compatibility

Select the “Product Name” as ESXi, “OS Family Name” as Windows Server 2019, “Product Release Version” as ALL and “OS Vendor” as Microsoft and click on “Update and View Results” button. You might be able to see something similar to this and expand the results with “+” sign. You can see the supported releases as the results

If you click on one of the versions listed you can see more details about the compatibility.

I’d like to highlight the redirected VMware Knowledge Base Article 59222 which provide the workaround to this problem.

It confirms that “Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (64bit) or Microsoft Windows Server 2016 or later (64bit)” can be selected as the guest Operating System in the middle of the deployment.

So, I hope that this article will provide some clear information about the VMware HCL usage and how to check your Operating System Compatibility with VMware ESXi versions prior to the Virtual Machine deployments.