If you read our previous article on how to Revert ESXi 5.5 VM Hardware Upgrades, you may be wondering what the actual differences are between hardware versions. Below is the virtual hardware matrix taken directly from the VMware Documentation Center website. Note that we have taken the liberty of removing the 4.x versions of ESXi from the matrix as they are not relevant to this article. Please note that changes are highlighted in yellow.
ESXi 5.x Virtual Hardware Matrix | |||
Feature By Version | 5.5 | 5.1 | 5.0 |
Hardware (VM) Version | 10 | 9 | 8 |
Max Memory(MB) | 1035264 | 1035264 | 1035264 |
Max Processors | 64 | 64 | 32 |
Max Cores Per Socket | 64 | 64 | 32 |
Max SCSI Adapters | 4 | 4 | 4 |
Bus Logic Adapters | Y | Y | Y |
LSI Logic Adapters | Y | Y | Y |
LSI Logic SAS Adapters | Y | Y | Y |
Paravirtual Controllers | Y | Y | Y |
SATA Controllers | 4 | N | N |
Virtual SCSI Disk | Y | Y | Y |
SCSI Passthrough | Y | Y | Y |
SCSI Hotplug Support | Y | Y | Y |
IDE Nodes | Y | Y | Y |
Virtual IDE Disk | Y | Y | Y |
Virtual IDE CD-ROM | Y | Y | Y |
IDE Hotplug Support | N | N | N |
Maximum NIC's | 10 | 10 | 10 |
PCNet32 NIC | Y | Y | Y |
VMXNet NIC | Y | Y | Y |
VMXNet2 NIC | Y | Y | Y |
VMXNet3 NIC | Y | Y | Y |
E1000 NIC | Y | Y | Y |
E1000e NIC | Y | Y | Y |
USB 1.X and 2.0 | Y | Y | Y |
USB 3.0 | Y | Y | Y |
Max Video Memory(KB) | 524288 | 524288 | 131072 |
SVGA Displays | 10 | 10 | 10 |
3D Hardware Acceleration | 10 | 10 | 10 |
VMCI | Y | Y | Y |
PCI Passthrough | 6 | 6 | 6 |
PCI Hotplug Support | Y | Y | Y |
Nested HV Support | Y | Y | N |
vPMC Support | Y | Y | N |
Serial Ports | 4 | 4 | 4 |
Parallel Ports | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Floppy Devices | 2 | 2 | 2 |