vSphere 6 Configuration Maximums – Super Scale

Remember 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.

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.