I know that for a VM to be able to access new CPU instructions on newer Intel CPUs on an ESXi host, it requires a certain minimum virtual hardware version. However, I've been trying unsuccessfully to find documentation that indicates which virtual hardware versions added support for the new instruction sets in various Intel CPU families. As per VMware's recommendations, we only want to upgrade the virtual hardware of existing VMs if that virtual hardware adds new features/functionality that we need, so we need to know which versions of virtual hardware added support for CPU instructions that are available on our hosts but that aren't exposed by our current virtual hardware versions.
For example, we have some ESXi 6.7 U3 hosts running Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz (these correspond to Broadwell, which is VMware EVC L7 per https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003212, but I can't find the minimum virtual hardware version that supports the CPU instructions introduced in that family.
As another example, we have some ESXi 6.7 U3 hosts running Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5120 CPU @ 2.20GHz (these correspond to Skylake, which is VMWare EVC L8 per https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003212), but I can't find the minimum virtual hardware version that supports the CPU instructions introduced in that family.