VMware developed/proprietary bare-metal hypervisor, which with vSphere 5 onwards is only available as ESXi (small foot-print without Console OS). The hypervisor itself is < 150MB. Device drivers are provided with the hypervisor (not with the Console OS or dom0/parent partition as with Xen or Hyper-V technologies).
ESX is based on binary translation (full virtualization) but also uses aspects of para-virtualization (device drivers, VMware tools and the VMI interface for para-virtualization) and supports hardware assisted virtualization aspects.

vSphere 6.0 features the new virtual hardware version 11
- 128vCPUs
- 4TB of RAM (NUMA aware)
- VDDM 1.1 GDI acceleration
- xHCI 1.0 controller compatible with OS X 10.8 + xHCI driver.
Expanded support for the latest x86 chip sets, devices, and drivers. Added support for FreeBSD 10.0 and Asianux 4 SP3 guest operating systems.

vSphere 5.5 features the new virtual hardware version 10 that includes support for LSI SAS for Solaris 11, CPU enablement for the latest processors and AHCI Controller Support to better run Mac OS X (as it allows you to present a SCSI based CD-ROM device to the guest). This new virtual-SATA controller supports both virtual disks and CD-ROM devices that can connect up to 30 devices per controller, with a total of four controllers.

It also enables a new Latency Sensitivity setting that can be used to reduce virtual machine latency. When the Latency sensitivity is set to high the hypervisor will try to reduce latency in the virtual machine by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and disabling network features that are prone to high latency.