The hardware compatibility maps to a virtual hardware version. The following table shows the relationships between the compatibility and the virtual machine hardware version:

Virtual Machine Hardware Version	Compatibility
VM version 14 (vmx-14)	ESXi 6.7 and later
VM version 13 (vmx-13)	ESXi 6.5 and later
VM version 11 (vmx-11)	ESXi 6.0 and later
VM version 10 (vmx-10)	ESXi 5.5 and later
VM version 9 (vmx-9)	ESXi 5.1 and later
VM version 8 (vmx-8)	ESXi 5.0 and later
VM version 7 (vmx-7)	ESX/ESXi 4.0 and later
VM version 4 (vmx-4)	ESX/ESXi 3.5 and later

 

When a virtual hardware upgrade is scheduled, the virtual hardware of the virtual machine is upgraded the next time the virtual machine is rebooted.

The virtual machine hardware version should be set to the compatibility of the lowest version of ESXi in the environment to ensure that the virtual machine can run on any host in the environment. For example, if a design includes both 6.0 and 6.7 hosts and a virtual machine's hardware is upgraded to vmx-14, the VM will no longer run on the ESXi 6.0 hosts.