ESXi 4.1 Appliances Runnable on ESXi 4.0?

[jfmorales]

If I create a VM on ESXi 4.1 and export it as an appliance, will I be able to import it and run it successfully on the previous ESXi level, ESXi 4.0? It seems like the kind of thing that might not be supported, but I haven't found any documentation that says so explicitly. Thanks.

[Troy_Clavell]

You should have no problems. The VMware Tools are backward compatible. I see no issue with what you would like to do.

[jfmorales]

Thanks. I guess my concern is whether something architectural about VMs might have changed in ESXi 4.1. For example, I believe 4.0 was the first release to have Thin Provisioning, so I'm not sure that 4.0 Thin Provisioned VMs could have run on 3.5. Similarly, 4.1 supports memory compression, so I'm not sure if this would make the VM incompatible with a 4.0 host. But perhaps it doesn't matter if memory compression is more of a runtime feature, that doesn't affect how the VM is stored?

[Troy_Clavell]

Thanks. I guess my concern is whether something architectural about VMs might have changed in ESXi 4.1. For example, I believe 4.0 was the first release to have Thin Provisioning, so I'm not sure that 4.0 Thin Provisioned VMs could have run on 3.5. Similarly, 4.1 supports memory compression, so I'm not sure if this would make the VM incompatible with a 4.0 host.

Thin provising has been around since late 3.5.

>But perhaps it doesn't matter if memory compression is more of a runtime feature, that doesn't affect how the VM is stored?

I say if you are concerned, make a clone of the original, and export to appliance the clone, and run that in you 4.0 environment. However, I still do not foresee any issues.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

If there is a possibility that the appliance would need to be run on 3.5 you would want to make sure you created the VM using the version 4 hardware choice during initial creation.

Version 4 hardware can run on 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1

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[jfmorales]

Thanks, Troy and DSTAVERT!