ESXi 5.5: Still Free But Limited

ESXi, which is VMWare’s free bare-metal hypervisor, released Version 5.5 in late September 2013. There are some great new features that basically double every configuration maximum from version 5.1. This also includes unlimited physical RAM on each host; which was limited to 32 GB prior.

What’s the downside, you ask? Once the virtual hardware of the VM is upgraded to Version 10, the VSphere 5.5 client can no longer be used to edit the specs of the VM itself. Furthermore, the only way to edit the VM properties is to use the VSphere web client, which is only available with the paid version of VMWare V-Sphere.

Therefore, if you are using the VSphere 5.5 client with ESXi do not create any new virtual machines, as it defaults each VM to hardware Version 10. If you do, you will end up being unable to edit your VM’s.

If you are using the 5.5 client and you accidentally upgrade the VM to Version 10 (like I did), you can revert back by following the procedure below:

To get around this, download the .vmx file (using VSphere client).

Edit the .vmx file, the line:

virtualHW.version = "10"

and changed it to

virtualHW.version = "8"

Then upload the .vmx file back to the VM folder on the datastore. Remove the VM from the inventory (be careful not to Delete from Disk). Go to the .vmx file on the datastore, choose 'Add to Inventory'.

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