VMware Hardware Version 13

by Davoud Teimouri · Published 24/11/2016 · Updated 04/04/2019

Each new version of vSphere includes some improvements and new features and many of them will be applied on virtual machines. The improvements and features will be add to “Hardware Version” and you be able to use those, if you use latest “Hardware Version”.

It’s strongly recommended that don’t upgrade your hardware version to latest just when you need to use a specific feature or expand hardware resources that older hardware version doesn’t support that.

Because “Hardware Version” doesn’t have any compatibility with older ESXi and if you have mixed cluster, you can’t use latest hardware version.

Here is an example:

You have a cluster and the cluster contains some ESXi 6.5, 6.0 and 5.5. If you upgrade hardware version to 11, your virtual machine will be hosted by ESXi 6.0, ESXi 6.5 and the machine will not be migrated on ESXi 5.5.

So, keep your hardware version compatible with oldest ESXi in your environment. You can downgrade hardware version but it’s not recommended.

For make sure about hardware version, you can change default version on your cluster anytime.

Let’s review new hardware version, compare it with older versions and compatibility with ESXi:

Feature	ESXi 6.5 and later	ESXi 6.0 and later	ESXi 5.5 and later	ESXi 5.1 and later	ESXi 5.0 and later	ESX/ESXi 4.x and later	ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later
Hardware version	13	11	10	9	8	7	4
Maximum memory (GB)	6128	4080	1011	1011	1011	255	64
Maximum number of logical processors	128	128	64	64	32	8	4
Maximum number of cores (virtual CPUs) per socket	128	128	64	64	32	8	1
Maximum SCSI adapters	4	4	4	4	4	4	4
Bus Logic adapters	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
LSI Logic adapters	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
LSI Logic SAS adapters	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
VMware Paravirtual controllers	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
SATA controllers	4	4	4	N	N	N	N
NVMe Controller s	4	N	N	N	N	N	N
Virtual SCSI disk	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
SCSI passthrough	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
SCSI hot plug support	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
IDE nodes	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Virtual IDE disk	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
Virtual IDE CD-ROMs	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
IDE hot plug support	N	N	N	N	N	N	N
Maximum NICs	10	10	10	10	10	10	4
PCNet32	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
VMXNet	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
VMXNet2	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
VMXNet3	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
E1000	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
E1000e	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N
USB 1.x and 2.0	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
USB 3.0	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N
Maximum video memory (MB)	2 GB	2 GB	512	512	128	128	128
SVGA displays	10	10	10	10	10	10	1
SVGA 3D hardware acceleration	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N
VMCI	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
PCI passthrough	16	16	6	6	6	6	0
PCI Hot plug support	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
Nested HV support	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	N
vPMC support	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	N
Serial ports	32	32	4	4	4	4	4
Parallel ports	3	3	3	3	3	3	3
Floppy devices	2	2	2	2	2	2	2