The hardware version of a virtual machine reflects the virtual machine's supported virtual hardware features. These features correspond to the physical hardware available on the ESXi host on which you create the virtual machine. Virtual hardware features include BIOS and EFI, available virtual PCI slots, maximum number of CPUs, maximum memory configuration, and other characteristics typical to hardware.
When you create a virtual machine, you can accept the default hardware version, which corresponds to the host on which you create the virtual machine, or an earlier version. You can use an earlier hardware version in the following situations:
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To standardize testing and deployment in your virtual environment. |
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Virtual machines with hardware versions earlier than version 8 can run on ESXi 5.0 hosts, but do not have all the capabilities available in hardware version 8. For example, you cannot use 32 virtual processors or 1000GB of memory in virtual machines with hardware versions earlier than version 8.
The vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client allows you to upgrade virtual machines only to the latest hardware version. If virtual machines do not have to stay compatible with older ESX/ESXi hosts, you can upgrade them on ESXi 5.0 hosts. In this case, they are upgraded to version 8.
A virtual machine can have an earlier hardware version than that of the host on which it runs in the following cases:
You can create, edit, and run different virtual machine versions on a host if the host supports that version. Sometimes, virtual machine actions on a host are limited or the virtual machine has no access to the host.
Version 3 virtual machines are not supported on ESXi 5.0 hosts. To make full use of these virtual machines, upgrade the virtual hardware.