Virtual Machine Version 19

[Lilliana Adames]

Thisarticle guides you through the process of determining if your virtual machine's hardware version is the most up to date for the VMware product that you are using. This resource also explains why a virtual machine created with one product may not power on from another product.

If you are experiencing a problem related to a virtual machine's hardware version, the information in this article may resolve the issue.

For information specific to:

To upgrade the virtual hardware:

Note: For Lab Manager virtual machines, they must be undeployed, have their virtual hardware version upgraded from their configuration, then redeployed.

Reactivation of a Windows guest operating system is not needed after upgrading the virtual hardware version. Update the VMware Tools version on the virtual machine for better performance, if prompted.

For information on virtual hardware versions and limitations, see Virtual machine memory limits and hardware versions (1014006).

Virtual machine hardware version compatibility for Fusion

Using the PowerShell cmdlet Get-VMHostSupportedVersion you can see what virtual machine configuration versions your Hyper-V Host supports. When you create a virtual machine, it's created with the default configuration version. To see which virtual machine configuration versions your Hyper-V Host supports and what the default is, run the following command.

If you need to create a virtual machine that you can move to a Hyper-V Host that runs an older version of Windows, use the New-VM cmdlet with the -Version parameter. For example, to create a virtual machine named "WindowsCV5" with configuration version 5.0, run the following command:

You can only import a virtual machine if the Hyper-V host supports that configuration version. Typically, this means that you can import a virtual machine to a Hyper-V host running a newer version of Hyper-V, but you cannot import a virtual machine created on a newer version of Hyper-V to an older version of Hyper-V.

If the VM's configuration version is not listed as supported for your Hyper-V host OS in the table below, you either have to upgrade the VM configuration version to a newer version or create a new VM of the same generation using the existing virtual hard disks before you can start the VM.

The following table lists the VM configuration versions for hosts running a Semi-Annual Channel version of Windows. To get more information on Semi-Annual Channel versions of Windows, visit the following pages for Windows Server and Windows.

When you move or import a virtual machine to a computer that runs Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, or Windows 10, the virtual machine's configuration isn't automatically updated. This means that you can move the virtual machine back to a Hyper-V host that runs a previous version of Windows or Windows Server. But, this also means that you can't use some of the new virtual machine features until you manually update the configuration version.

The virtual machine configuration version represents the compatibility of the virtual machine's configuration, saved state, and snapshot files with the version of Hyper-V. When you update the configuration version, you change the file structure that is used to store the virtual machines configuration and the checkpoint files. You also update the configuration version to the latest version supported by that Hyper-V host. Upgraded virtual machines use a new configuration file format, which is designed to increase the efficiency of reading and writing virtual machine configuration data. The upgrade also reduces the potential for data corruption in the event of a storage failure.

If you have virtual machines that you created with an earlier version of Hyper-V, some features that are available on the newer host OS may not work with those virtual machines until you update the configuration version.

As a general guidance, we recommend updating the configuration version once you have successfully upgraded the virtualization hosts to a newer version of Windows and feel confident that you do not need to roll back. When you are using the cluster OS rolling upgrade feature, this would typically be after updating the cluster functional level. This way, you will benefit from new features and internal changes and optimizations as well.

I believe VMware recommends not upgrading HW versions so that there is not conflicts or issues when a VM is used between different product platforms such as ESXi, Fusion, Workstation, etc. Different products have different maximum levels of HW version support.

The recommendation from VMware is to only upgrade the virtual hardware version if new features are needed. This is because upgrading the virtual hardware version can be the equivalent of swapping out the drive of one system and placing it into a new one, which can cause compatibility issues if the guest operating system is not resilient in the face of hardware changes.

While upgrading the hardware compatibility along with other components during a major version upgrade is a common practice, it is important to consider whether new features are actually needed before doing so. If there are no new features that require the hardware upgrade, it may be best to leave the virtual hardware version as is to avoid any potential compatibility issues.

A VMware Virtual Machine hardware version refers to the configuration of virtual hardware components and features that are available to a virtual machine running on the hypervisor. Each version of VM hardware provides a set of features and capabilities that can be utilized by the virtual machine, including vCPU, memory, network adapters, and storage controllers.

VMware releases new virtual hardware versions with each generation of its virtualization products. To ensure compatibility between a virtual machine and the platform, make sure to choose the appropriate hardware version for the virtual machine. Some VM hardware versions come with performance enhancements so updating them regularly can help to improve performance.

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Oracle ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

In order to avoid running into the very issue we are covering here, do not upgrade your VMs unless all the hosts in the cluster are running the same vSphere version. Also, note that you should always update the VMware Tools before the compatibility as they may include drivers for potential new virtual hardware.

Now getting to the matter at hand. You may need to downgrade for various reasons but the most common one is when someone upgraded a VM to the latest version when older hosts are still in the cluster. The VM then cannot be moved to it which reduces the overall failover capacity of your workloads.

As mentioned earlier, this cannot be done natively like an upgrade so we need to resort to alternative methods. VMware actually has a KB describing 3 different ways to do it which we will go through here.

This method may be slightly inconvenient if the VM in question is equipped with many disks like the VCSA appliance which sports no less than a dozen. Adding each and every one manually is error-prone so pay attention to steps 1 and 4 if you go that route.

I created a virtual machine with VMware Player v6.0.1, and I copied the vm to a server where it must run, but the player version there is v5.0.0,an when trying to run the VM is giving me the following error:

I faced the same issue, What i did was opened the vmx file/VMware Virtual machine configuration file in notepad++ and changed the value of the field "virtualHW.version" to that of the version number of workstaion in which you want to open it in.scenario: I had VMWare Workstation 12 before then i switched to version 8.and changed the virtualHW.version = 12 to virtualHW.version = 8.and it worked flawlessly.peace out! :-p

The purpose of our article is to provide a comprehensive VMware hardware version overview. By way of background, VMware is an unquestionable leader in the market of cloud computing and virtualization, with the product line rich enough to suit the needs of virtually all businesses. So far, the company has released more than 10 virtual hardware versions.

Virtual hardware includes BIOS and Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), while its version determines the amount of virtual PCI slots, maximum number of virtual cores, maximum memory size, and other characteristics typical for a physical machine. As an example, the maximum memory size in ESXi 6.0 (hardware version 11) is 4,080 GB, while in ESXi 6.5 (hardware version 13), it is as much as 6,128 GB.

A VMware product is unable to power on a VM if its hardware version is higher than this product supports. For example, VMware Fusion 6.x (VMware hypervisor for Macintosh) can only run a VM on a VMware hardware version 10 or lower. In order to run a VM on hardware version 11, you need VMware Fusion 7.x.

A quick reference: VMware ESXi is an enterprise-grade hypervisor designed for creating, running, and serving virtual machines. It is designed for bare-metal installation, meaning that it does not rely on an operating system, which allows for higher security and reliability.

If you are creating a new VM or upgrading an existing one, pay attention to the VM compatibility settings: you need to properly select the ESXi host version that the VM can run on. Precisely put, the compatibility settings determine the virtual hardware functions that are available to a VM. Each compatibility level of virtual hardware supports several vSphere releases. For example, a VM running on ESXi 5.5 can also run on ESXi 6.0, and ESXi 6.5.

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