8.1

Change the Hardware Compatibility of a Virtual Machine
The latest virtual machine hardware version available yields the best performance and most reliable
behavior from the applications running in your virtual machine.
Virtual machines with hardware version 10 or later are created with SATA hard disks or CD drives.
Upgrading your virtual machine from hardware version 9 or earlier does not change any devices in your
virtual machine to SATA. If you want to use SATA disks or drives with your virtual machine, you must
manually change the disk and drive types.
Prerequisites
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Evaluate the applications running in your virtual machine to determine which hardware version to
select. Some applications might have specific hardware requirements offered through a virtual machine
hardware version older than the latest available version.
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Consider taking a snapshot of the virtual machine. If changing the hardware version of your virtual
machine results in undesirable behavior, you can revert to the snapshot taken before the hardware
version upgrade.
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Shut down or power off your virtual machine before you change its hardware version.
Procedure
1 Select Window > Virtual Machine Library.
2 Select a virtual machine in the Virtual Machine Library window and click Settings.
3 Under Other in the Settings window, click Compatibility.
4 Under Advanced options, select a hardware version from the Use Hardware Version drop-down
menu.
When you select a hardware compatibility setting, a list of the VMware products that are compatible
with that setting appears. For example, if you select hardware version 10, a list of VMware products
that this version supports appears. Limitations for the selected hardware version also appear.
Some hardware options might not be available for selection, for example, older hardware versions that
your current version of Fusion does not support.
5 (Optional) Click Revert to return to the hardware version that your virtual machine uses. When you
revert your hardware version, you can view the compatibility and limits of your current hardware
version.
6 Click Apply to change the virtual machine hardware version.
7 Click Close.
The hardware version of the virtual machine is changed.
What to do next
Power on the virtual machine.
Choose the Hardware Version for a Virtual Machine
Upgrading the hardware version of your virtual machine improves performance by increasing the memory
limit, the number of processors utilized, and the amount of disk space available to the virtual machine.
Prerequisites
Verify that you have the latest version of VMware tools installed.
Using VMware Fusion
134 VMware, Inc.