In the upcoming version of VMware ESX, the virtual machines are running on a different virtual motherboard. This new motherboard is based on the Intel 82440BX and provides signifently higher virtual machine maximums. I created a new virtual machine and added 10 virtual NICS to it. In the screenshot you can see the guest OS displaying the 10 NICS.
The following table contains configuration maximums related to virtual machines in the new version.
| Virtual CPUs per virtual machine | 8 |
| Size of RAM per virtual machine | 255GB |
| Virtual SCSI adapter per virtual machine | 4 |
| VMDirectPath PCI devices per virtual machine | 2 (Requires IO MMU on host) |
| VMDirectPath SCSI devices per virtual machine | 60 |
| Devices per SCSI controller | 15 |
| SCSI devices per virtual machine | 60 |
| NICs per virtual machine | 10 |
| vmxnet3 NICs | 10 (You can network boot from the first eight devices) |
| IDE controllers per virtual machine | 1 |
| IDE devices per virtual machine | 4 |
| Floppy controllers per virtual machine | 1 |
| Floppy devices per virtual machine | 2 (BIOS default configuration is for 1 device) |
| Parallel ports per virtual machine | 3 |
| Serial ports per virtual machine | 4 |
| Size of a virtual machine swap file | 255GB (Maximum is the same as the size of the guest memory) |
| Number of remote consoles to a virtual machine | 40 |
| Virtual SCSI adapters of any type per virtual machine | 4 (Adapter types include LSI Logic, BusLogic, SAS, and Paravirtual) |
| Targets per virtual SCSI adapter | 15 |
| Targets per virtual machine | 60 |
| Size of SCSI disk | 2TB minus 512B |
