Comments on: Capabilities of vSphere VMs Using Hardware Version 7

By: T. Davis

T. Davis — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:10:34 +0000

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.

By: Anton Zhbankov

Anton Zhbankov — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:52:25 +0000

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

By: Anton Zhbankov

Anton Zhbankov — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:52:25 +0000

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

By: T@T

T@T — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:53:30 +0000

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

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:37:04 +0000

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.

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:23:28 +0000

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?

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:57:53 +0000

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.

By: Dracolith

Dracolith — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:45:52 +0000

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…