With vSphere 6 VMware introduced a new virtual hardware version, too – vHW11.
This new hardware version enables new maximum configurations and features listed below. Below you can find a list with enhancements and a compatiblity list showing vSphere Version to supported virtual hardware versions.
New configuration maximums for virtual machines with vHW11:
- 128 vCPUs
- 4 TB vRAM
- 32 serial ports
New features with vHW11:
- vNUMA aware hot-add RAM
- WDDM 1.1 GDI acceleration
- USB 3.0 xHCI controller
- extended support for virtual graphics incl. Nvidia vGPU
Expanded Guest OS Support:
- Solaris 11.2
- Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 Quaterly Update 3
- Asanux 4 SP4
- Ubuntu 12.04.5 and 14.04.1
- Oracle Linux 7
- FreeBSD 9.3
- Mac OSX 10.10
Compatibility list virtual hardware version to ESXi/vCenter Server version:
| vHW11 | vHW10 | vHW9 | vHW8 | vHW7 | vHW4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| vCenter Server 6 ESXi 6 |  | | | | | |
| vCenter Server 5.5 ESXi 5.5 | - | | | | | |
| vCenter Server 5.1 ESXi 5.1 | - | - | | | | |
| vCenter Server 5.0 ESXi 5.0 | - | - | - | | | |
| vCenter Server 4.x ESXi 4.x | - | - | - | - | | |
| vCenter Server 2.x and later ESXi 3.x | - | - | - | - | - | |
= compatible: create, edit and run