Downgrade Hardware Level of VMWare Appliance

In recent ApplicationInsights versions, the minimum required hardware level of our appliances is 11 (formerly 8). This means we support VMWare versions from ESXi 6.0 and Workstation 11.x and up.

If you are running older version, please follow these steps to downgrade (to level 8 in this example):

1.  Open the .ova file with 7zip
2. Delete the .cert and .mf inside of the .ova

3. Edit the .ovf file inside of the .ova and set the VirtualSystemType element to vmx-08:

   <vssd:VirtualSystemType>vmx-08</vssd:VirtualSystemType>

4. Import the .ova file and startup the appliance

5. Uninstall the open-vm-tools package:

   yum remove open-vm-tools

   
   

6. Install the correct open-vm-tools version:

   Info

   Pick open-vm-tools version depending on ESXi version: https://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions. Open-vm-tools rpm downloads: https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=open-vm-tools. 

   yum install ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/7.4/x86_64/os/Packages/open-vm-tools-10.1.5-3.el7.x86_64.rpm

7. Exclude open-vm-tools from yum upgrades:
   Add following line to /etc/yum.conf

   exclude=open-vm-tools*

8. Reboot the appliance to finish the downgrade