ESX 4 and VM’s with hardware version 7

Now that we are in the vSphere Era (I still keep looking back to ESX 3 and ESX 3.5 though… ), the standard for the VM’s hardware version is the version 7. But what that is mean? There is quite a few enhancements.

As you can see, the new ESX 4 supports USB. That’s a good idea. Since long time ago, present in a VMware Workstation, the USB controller finally make its apparition in vSphere 4. The new virtual hardware in ESX/ESXi 4.0 has significant new features like:

Virtual Machine Hot Plug Support— The new virtual hardware introduced in ESX/ESXi 4.0 provides support for adding and removing virtual devices, adding virtual CPUs, and adding memory to a virtual machine without having to power off the virtual machine. See the Guest Operating System Installation Guide for the list of operating systems for which this functionality is supported.

256GB RAM — Up to 256GB RAM can be assigned to ESX/ESXi 4.0 virtual machines.

VMXNET Generation 3 — VMXNET3 is the third generation para-virtualized NIC from VMware. New VMXNET3 features over previous version of Enhanced VMXNET include:

• MSI/MSI-X support (subject to guest operating system kernel support)3
• Receive Side Scaling (supported in Windows 2008 when explicitly enabled through the device’s Advanced configuration tab)
• IPv6 checksum and TCP Segmentation Offloading (TSO) over IPv6
  VLAN off-loading
• Large TX/RX ring sizes (configured from within the virtual machine)

8-way Virtual SMP — ESX/ESXi 4.0 provides support for virtual machines with up to 8 virtual CPUs allowing larger CPU-intensive workloads to be run on the VMware ESX platform. It is also possible to assign any integer number of virtual CPUs between 1 and 8 to a VM. See the Guest Operating System Installation Guide for a list of guest operating systems that support 8-way SMP.

• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual device for Microsfot Cluster Service — Provides support for running Windows Server 2008 in a Microsoft Cluster Service configuration.
• IDE virtual device — Ideal for supporting older operating systems that lack SCSI drivers

Technorati Tags: ESX 4, virtual machine hardware version 7, vSphere 4, vSphere VM hardware

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