How to Downgrade VMware Hardware Version
Do you have a VM with a too high hardware version, which can’t be migrated to an older VMware ESXi host? And the rest of your environment is running on the latest VMware vSphere version i.e. you’ve upgraded to the latest version of vCenter Server, ESXi, VMware Tools?
I’ll show you a way to make the VM compatible again.
I bought a HPE ML310e Gen8 v2 with a LSI MegaRaid 9240-i4 raid controller. This is unfortunately not on the VMware HCL list for VMware vSphere 7.0 U2 and so even a custom image from HPE doesn’t bring any drivers and I don’t see the disk groups during installation. So I had to go down one version and mounted VMware vSphere 6.7 U3 with a HPE custom image and lo and behold, the disk groups are shown.
However, this server is to replace an HPE Microserver Gen8, which is running VMware vSphere 7.0 U2, all VM’s on the server have a hardware version 19 (currently highest), so I couldn’t migrate them to the HPE ML310e Gen8 v2. I got an error message during the VMware vMotion process that the hardware version is not compatible with the target server. So what to do? I’ll show you now:
Fast Steps:
- Select the VM you want to adjust
- Make a Snapshot of the VM
- Power Off the VM
- Connect to the ESXi host with WinSCP
- Change to the directory of the VM whose hardware version you want to adjust
- Edit the .vmx file with Notepad++
- Now adjust in line 3 the virtualHW.version = “XXX” to the desired version
- Now boot the VM
- Examine the Compatibility in the VM
- Go to the snapshots of the VM and select DELETE ALL to consolidate the files
Step by Step process:
If you have any questions, please leave a comment. 🙂