VMware Compatibility Guide

VMware ESX software delivers high performance I/O for PCI based SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet controllers. To achieve high performance, these devices are accessed directly through device drivers in the ESX host, and not through a host operating system, as with VMware Workstation and VMware Server products.

Support for I/O devices listed in this document is specific to device compatibility with the VMware ESX versions listed in the corresponding tables. This does not imply a statement of support for adding a device to any certified system. System vendors determine device compatibility with a given system. Please refer to the compatibility list provided by the system vendor before adding a certified device to a certified system.

NOTE: IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system.
NOTE: You cannot simultaneously run devices using the mptscsi driver and ones using the mptscsi_2xx driver.
NOTE: You cannot simultaneously run devices using the aacraid driver and ones using the aacraid_esx30 driver.
NOTE: You cannot simultaneously run devices using the megaraid2 driver and ones using the megaraid_sas driver.
NOTE: SAS 2.0 controllers are supported only with VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0u1 and newer releases. Dual speed(6Gb/s and 3Gb/s) SAS controllers are only supported at 3Gb/s speed with vSphere 4.0 and earlier releases.
NOTE: ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0 Embedded and ESXi 4.0 Installable are equivalent products from an I/O device compatibility perspective. In this guide we only explicitly list ESX compatibility information. If a product is listed as supported for ESX, the product is also supported in corresponding versions of ESXi Embedded and ESXi Installable.

If you are having a technical issue with 3rd party HW/SW and it is not found on this list, please refer to our 3rd Party HW/SW support policy at http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/ThirdParty.html.