VMware ESXi downgrade a virtual machine hardware version compatibility

Bob Pellerin (CTOBOB) answers questions about hardware compatibility and how to “hack” the version manually. In our scenario, we’ll take a virutal machine (VM) that was set to version 17 (ESXi 7.0) to bring back into a version 13 (ESXi 6.5) environment.

Without changing anything a VM restored to an older, in some cases will produce an error. Using this trick we export the VM, alter the configuration file and successfully restore.

ESXi/vCenter Version Hardware version
ESXi 7.0 17
ESXi 6.7u2 15
ESXi 6.7 14
ESXi 6.5 13
ESXi 6.0 11
ESXi 5.5 10
ESXi 5.1 9

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