VSICM55 - Slide 03-10 - Virtual Machine Hardware

Slide graphic and notes make no mention about the capabilities of the SATA AHCI adapters, introduced in vSphere 5.5.

According to the "Configuration Maximums for VMware vSphere 5.5" document, you can configure up to the following:

• Virtual SATA adapters per virtual machine: 4
• Virtual SATA devices per virtual SATA adapter: 30

Devices can be either CD-ROM or disks.

The "vSphere Virtual Machine Administration" guide - "Configuring Virtual Machine Hardware in the vSphere Web Client" chapter - "SCSI and SATA Storage Controller Conditions, Limitations, and Compatibility" paragraph offers more information.

Each virtual machine can have a maximum of four SCSI controllers and four SATA controllers.

If you add a SATA controller, you can reassign an existing or new hard disk or device to that controller. For example, you can assign the device to (1:z ), where 1 is SATA controller 1 and z is a virtual device node from 0 to 29. For SATA controllers, you can use device nodes 0 through 29, including 0:7.

Last sentence, referring to device node 0:7, stating it can be used to allocate virtual disks to a SATA controller, is opposed to SCSI controllers where node 0:7 is by default assigned to the virtual SCSI controller itself.