vcenter appliance hardware version question

[sel57]

Ok, I am behind the times and thinking of completely moving to the vcenter 5.5 appliance to get off my physical windows install of vcenter 5.1. I have some vm's with pretty beefy specs, so when I came across the below statement, I became a bit concerned.

If you update the vCenter Server appliance to hardware version 10, you cannot edit the virtual machine settings for the appliance using the vSphere Client. This might cause difficulties in managing the vCenter Server Appliance, because you cannot use the vSphere Web Client to connect directly to the host on which the vCenter Server Appliance resides to manage it. Do not upgrade the vCenter Server Appliance to hardware version 10.

Does it matter what hardware version my vcenter 5.5 appliance is? (default right now is 7 I think) If I add 5.1 or 5.5 hosts to it, will I still be able to upgrade the hardware version on vm's and configure/run them with more than 8 vCPU? The hardware version only effects what you can allocate (using vCPU as an example) to the individual vm, right?

ESXi 4.x supports up to virtual hardware version 7 with up to 8 virtual CPUs per virtual machine.

ESXi 5.0.x supports up to virtual hardware version 8 with up to 32 virtual CPUs per virtual machine.

ESXi 5.1.x supports up to virtual hardware version 9 with up to 64 virtual CPUs per virtual machine.

I suppose since my vcenter 5.5 is currently in my 5.1 vcenter environment for now, I could conceivably upgrade to a max of hardware version 9 and be fine, but I'm not even sure if it matters or not.

Your thought are appreciated.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

Does it matter what hardware version my vcenter 5.5 appliance is? (default right now is 7 I think)

No, since you give the hardware requirements to run the vCSA VM.

If I add 5.1 or 5.5 hosts to it, will I still be able to upgrade the hardware version on vm's and configure/run them with more than 8 vCPU?

Yes, the hardware version of other VMs do not depend on hardware version of your vCSA VM, but just from the version of vCenter/ESXi you're running.

The hardware version only effects what you can allocate (using vCPU as an example) to the individual vm, right?

Basically yes, but there is a lot of new features in new hardware versions, take a look: Hardware Features Available with Virtual Machine Compatibility Settings

And, take in mind that with the vSphere Client 5.5 Update 2 you can edit virtual machines with hardware 10, with some limitations, but you can: Using vSphere 5.5U2 Client to edit the settings of virtual machines of version 10 or higher | VMware...

[sel57]

Thanks Richardson. So I guess my only limitation is what I can assign to the Vcenter appliance itself, since it comes default at hardware version 7, but I don't see that being an issue as I can't see needing more than 8 vCPU for it anytime soon.

[rcporto]

Yes, you're correct... and the vCSA requires only two vCPU, then there is no problem stay on hardware version 7.

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