5.4.1.2. vApp and Virtual Machine Hardware Version Considerations
Virtual machine
hardware version 9 is supported in vSphere 5.1. This support is carried over to vCloud Director. For maximum configuration values, see VMware Configuration Maximums (VMware vSphere 5.0) (
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r50/vsphere-50-configuration-maximums.pdf)
. The major use cases for using hardware version 9 are:
Windows 8 XP mode
– XP mode allows a virtualized
Windows XP instance to run on Windows 8 for compatibility with older applications that do
not run natively on Windows 8.
Users running
XP mode in Windows 8 must
choose an organization virtual datacenter that is backed by a p
rovider virtual datacenter
with support for virtual hardware version 9.
After adding support for virtual hardware version 9, you
must also enable the Nested HV feature.64-bit nested virtualization
– Hyper-V and virtualized
VMware vSphere ESXi™ nested virtualization can be helpful for non-production use cases,
such as training and demonstration environments. Virtualized Hyper-V or virtualized ESXi running nested 64-bit virtual machines requires
virtual hardware version 9 with the Nested HV feature enabled.CPU-intensive workloads
– Running
a CPU-intensive workload in a virtual machine
requiring between
32
and 64 vCPUs
requires
virtual hardware version 9.