Vmware ESXI: You cannot use the vSphere client to edit the settings of virtual machines of version 10 or higher

Few days back, At remote location, when I converted a physical Linux machine into virtual machine (based on ESXI 5.5 , machine ver 10) I received following error when tried to edit its properties to add new interface card.

Editing virtual machine settings fails with the error: You cannot use the vSphere client to edit the settings of virtual machines of version 10 or higher ...

 

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I had the option to downgrade it using v-converter client, but Time was really short as whole network was down and old physical machine was also out of order, so I used following hack to add the interface quickly and make it online.

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• Turn OFF the required Guest,
• Remove the guest from the inventory (Right-click -> remove from inventory)
• Browse your ESXI datastore where guest files are placed,
• Now Download the .vmx file from your the location where your guest files are placed (Example guest’s name.vmx file)
• Open it in any text editor (Example NOTEPAD PLUS+),
• Change the following … 

virtualHW.version = “10”

to

 

virtualHW.version = “8”

As showed in the image below …

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• Save this file and upload back to original location.
• Add the guest back to your inventory by right clicking the vmx file and selecting “Add to inventory”

Now try to edit the guest properties, and this time you will be able to do it.

There were some other workarounds too but in that particular situation, I found this method the most quickest and above all it worked well 🙂

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Regard’s
Syed Jahanzaib