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Capabilities of vSphere VMs Using Hardware Version 7

PostDateIcon June 17th, 2009 | PostAuthorIcon Author: Rich Brambley

The last part of Upgrading VMware VI 3.X to vSphere 4 involves upgrading the individual virtual machine (VM) VM tools and virtual hardware. Although guests can still run hosted on ESX 4 if the virtual hardware is not upgraded, there are some great features of Hardware version 7 (v7) that are worth the reboots required.

This post is a summary of my notes and various cut and pastes from several VMware vSphere presentations and documents. I’ve tried to organize them to where the content can be read in a logical flow. I’ve directly copied a lot of this information from the What’s New in vSphere 4.0 VMTN community document, so I’ll just recognize VMware as the provider of this information. Check out the whole document for features and maximums of vCenter and ESX 4 as well.

This VMware slide shows all the configuration maximums for vSphere 4 VMs using v7 hardware.

From the VMTN community document:

Hardware version 7 is the default for new ESX/ESXi 4.0 virtual machines. ESX/ESXi 4.0 will continue to run virtual machines created on hosts running ESX Server versions 2.x and 3.x. Virtual machines that use virtual hardware version 7 features are not compatible with ESX/ESXi releases prior to version 4.0.

Virtual Machine Scalability and Functionality

New Virtual Hardware — ESX/ESXi 4.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware (virtual hardware version 7) which adds significant new features including:

  • New storage virtual devices:
    • 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.
  • 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)
    • 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.
  • 256GB RAM — Up to 256GB RAM can be assigned to ESX/ESXi 4.0 virtual machines.
  • Enhanced VMotion Compatibility — Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) automatically configures servers whose CPUs feature Intel FlexMigration and AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be VMotion-compatible with servers that use older CPUs. ESX/ESXi 4.0 adds additional flexibility when configuring EVC clusters over earlier ESX releases that have EVC support.
  • 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.

The following slides illustrate information about the configurations necessary to hot add virtual hardware.



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PostCategoryIcon Posted in vmware, vSphere | PostTagIcon Tags: , ,
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  • JoeF

    I guess VMware is confused because one slide says that a VM can have 256GB of RAM, while another document says upto 255GB. Thanks VMware…hope that isn't on any exams.

  • http://www.boche.net/blog/ Jason Boche

    @JoeF: The marketing answer is 256GB of RAM. The technical answer is 255GB of RAM and it has to do with VMFS block size limitations when using a 1MB block size. VMware hasn't updated their slides to reflect this catch. These things bug me too and in 1992, 1GB of RAM would have meant a world of difference; today not so much.

    @Rich: Great read and nicely put together. Good job!

  • JoeF

    Thanks Jason. I really do get sick of marketing driving slides. The technical numbers should be in all slides. We as the technical people that have to implement the solutions are berated with questions and look stupid when we say incorrect numbers. This drives me insane!!!!

  • Dracolith

    Is the limit still 255GB (and not 256) if I format the VMFS filesystem using a 2MB block size?

    Or if I use NFS with a backend FS that can handle large files, or I set a high memory reservation on the VM to avoid making a 256mb swapfile…

  • http://www.boche.net/blog/ Jason Boche

    The limit is 255GB for any configuration. The sole reason is so that 256GB RAM VMs residing on a 1MB block size VMFS could require (if no reservation is set) a 256GB VMkernel swap file, plus a small amount of overhead for the VM. This would exceed the 256GB limitation of a 1MB block size VMFS volume. For this reason, VMware pushed the RAM limit to 255GB so the max file space that could be used is 255GB plus a small chunk for overhead which comes out under the 256GB limit of a 1MB block size.

  • http://vmetc.com rbrambley

    All,

    Thanks for the comments and explanations. I'm still confused by the
    answer to Dracolith's question about a 2MB Block size VMFS volume.

    2MB block size means a file greater than 256 GB is allowed on the VMFS
    which would allow a 256 GB VMkernel swap file. Right?

  • http://www.boche.net/blog/ Jason Boche

    Yes, that is correct, however, for the protection of those with 1MB block sizes (and there are a lot of them in the world), VMware has chosen a “one size fits all” solution. It's a “If I can't have a 256GB VM, then nobody can” type scenario. Doesn't make it right but scaling memory limits on VMFS block sizes might get difficult from a support standpoint.

  • T@T

    Is there any way to add sound card device to VM version 7?

  • http://blog.vadmin.ru/ Anton Zhbankov

    Hot-extending VMDKs are not ver.7 feature, I used them with 3.5.

  • http://blog.vadmin.ru/ Anton Zhbankov

    Hot-extending VMDKs are not ver.7 feature, I used them with 3.5.

  • T. Davis

    Can you recheck this information posted, it appears that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual device for Microsfot Cluster Service, IDE virtual device and VMXNET Gen 3 require HW v7, not the other items. Teh other items are not indented under Hw v7.

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