Month: February 2015

VMware vExpert Class of 2015

btrainor Professional Development

I am honored to be named vExpert for a second year!  Congratulations to all who made the list!  How exciting to once again be included in this esteemed group of talented folks, so willing to share of their time, knowledge and experience.  I am quite humbled to be counted among them, most of whom I will forever look up to. The numbers have increased year after year, which I’d like to assume is because the passion in this field is contagious and more people are answering the call to stand up, volunteer, and give back to the community.  Kudos to all the guys and gals who have paved the way for the rest of us.  And a special thanks to Corey Romero and the entire VMware Community Team!

I also give great thanks to John Troyer who started this years ago and who probably had the best tweet of all in the wake of the announcement:

Thanks for the inspiring call to action, Mr. Troyer!

vSphere 6 Configuration Maximums – Super Scale

btrainor VMware ,

monster-vmRemember when we thought that 32 vCPUs and 1TB of memory was a “Moster VM”?  Well…it still is.  However, with applications demanding more resources (think big data or intensive transactional apps), VMs will continue to consume larger chunks of the underlying hardware. With VMware aiming to run any application on their platform, they have continued to build super scalability into the product. vSphere 6 blows past the days of the fierce Monster VM and doubles, triples, even quadruples the limits of the previous 5.5 version (see VMware’s chart below). You can now provision VMs with 128 vCPUs and 4 TB of memory!  I’m not sure what the host would look like, but the bottom line is vSphere is built to handle it.

hw-max-60

These are some incredible leaps beyond the previous version.  Delving back into the archives, it’s fun to see how far VMware has come over the last ten years.  Below is a table showing their progression since the earlier days of GSX 2.0.

VMware Release

 2.0 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.1 5.0 5.1 5.5 6.0
vCPU per VM 2 4 4 8 8 32 64 64 128
RAM per VM 3.5 GB 16 GB 64 GB 255 GB 255 GB 1 TB 1 TB 1 TB 4 TB
CPUs per Host 16 32 32 64 128 160 160 320 480
RAM per Host 64 GB 64 GB 256 GB 1 TB 1 TB 2 TB 2 TB 4 TB 12 TB
VMs per Host 128 320 320 512 512 512 2048
Hosts per Cluster 16 32 32 32 32 32 32 64
VMs per Cluster 1280 3000 3000 4000 4000 8000

For simplicity, I’ve added an additional breakdown of all the known configuration maximums for vSphere 6. I’m still waiting to see storage, network and resource pool maximums and will update those as they become available.

vSphere 6 Configuration Maximums

  • vCenter (installable or appliance)
    • 1000 hosts
    • 10,000 virtual machines
  •  Cluster
    • 64 hosts
    • 8000 virtual machines
  •  Host
    • 480 physical CPUs
    • 12 TB RAM
    • 2048 virtual machines (What’s New document states 1000 VMs)
  • Virtual Machines
    • 128 vCPUs
    • 4 TB RAM
    • 32 serial ports
  • vSphere Fault Tolerance
    • 4 vCPUs per virtual machine
    • 64 GB RAM per virtual machine
    • 4 FT protected VMs per host
    • 8 protected vCPUs per host
  • vSphere High Availability
    • 64 hosts
    • 6000 virtual machines

Of especially important significance is the increase of vSphere FT jumping from its hard limitation of 1 vCPU to 4 vCPU.  Finally, the more critical applications that often demand the higher resource capacity and have zero tolerance for downtime, can now be fully protected.

vSphere 6 brings additional scalability enhancements such as vMotion between data centers and hot add memory  support for NUMA nodes.  More to come on these!

For more information, read VMware’s What’s New in the vSphere 6.0 Platform or find additional links on my vSphere 6.0 Announced! page.

vSphere 6.0 Announced!

btrainor VMware ,

The long awaited major upgrade of vSphere has been unveiled! Today, VMware’s Pat Gelsinger and Ben Fathi made the official announcement of the vSphere 6.0 release with some amazing innovations. They claim this release offers 650+ new features and enhancements!  The following list highlights just a few of the more noteworthy features:

  • Install and upgrade capability enhancements
  • New hardware, architectures, and guest OS expanded support
  • Scalability increases
  • Storage IO Control additions
  • Storage and availability integration increases
  • NFSv4.1 with Kerberos
  • vMotion enhancements
  • vSphere Fault Tolerance for multi-processor VMs (SMP-FT)
  • vCloud Air integration
  • vSphere replication improvements in scalability and performance
  • App HA expanded support
  • Network IO Control expanded support
  • Web Client enhancements
  • Multi-site content library
  • vSphere host client
  • VMware certificate life cycle management

Along with this product launch, VMware also made announcements of upgrades and advances to the following products:

I will be posting articles over the next few weeks as I delve further into these products and upgrades.  Feel free to check back as I share more content on these exciting releases.  In the meantime, browse the technical docs that VMware has already published:

Or give the products a spin on the free hosted evaluations (Hands On Labs):

VMware will continue to promote these announcements over the next month on their One Cloud, Any Application announcement page as well as on Twitter (along with the rest of the community) with the #vmw28days hashtag.  Be sure to follow!