Let’s have a look at this article on how to change hardware compatibility of virtual machines in VMware Workstation. You can change the virtual machine hardware compatibility. All virtual machines have a hardware version. The VMs hardware version shows which virtual hardware features the virtual machine supports, such as UEFI or BIOS, maximum number of CPUs, number of virtual slots, maximum memory configuration, and different hardware characteristics.
When you upgrade Workstation, you need to change the hardware compatibility of VMs that were created in past versions of Workstation so that they have to use the new features in the latest version of Workstation Pro. You can easily run older versions of VMs in the new version of VMware Workstation Pro, but you won’t have the benefits of the new features.
Change Hardware Compatibility in VMware Workstation
As you possibly know, each version of VMware Workstation is a version of virtual hardware.
This allows us to:
Make backward compatibility with older versions of VMware Workstation.
Create a virtual machine that is agreeable with other VMware products, such as ESXi, Fusion…
When we run a virtual machine, we see that it uses hardware compatibility “Workstation 15.” and that we will upgrade it by clicking on “Upgrade this virtual machine”.
Welcome to the change hardware compatibility wizard, choose next.
At the moment, the virtual machine is compatible with Workstation 15.x, which means various limitations.
Choose version 16.x and you will see the limitations and compatible VMware products will change.
As you can see, VMware Workstation Pro allows you to,
Support up to 128 GB of RAM
Support 32 processors
Benefit from 8 GB of graphic memory
When you have to upgrade the virtual machine’s virtual hardware, you have 2 possibilities.
Create a new clone of this virtual machine: create a copy of it and upgrade that copy
Alter this virtual machine: upgrade the required virtual machine without creating a copy first
Though this upgrade isn’t a problem in 99.9% of cases, one day a virtual hardware
So, we recommend that you need to take a snapshot of the VM before upgrading the virtual hardware if this virtual machine is important to you.
Review the changes and then click finish.
Converting the virtual machine.
Start this virtual machine.
Once opening the guest operating system, go to the VM menu and then click Update VMware Tools.
Visit VMware to know more.
