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VMware vSphere 6 – Scalability

27 February 2015 Andrea Mauro

This post is also available in: Italian

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The new VMware vSphere 6.0, recently announced, increase all configuration maximums to new limits (compared to the 5.5 and previous versions).

Maybe we can say with no limit, or at least, to be serious, with really huge numbers compared to the actual needs and the existing compunting power. Those new limits are both for scalability aspect, but also to fit with possible performance requirements, considering that a bigger number of business critical applications are going in the virtual environment.

~~Note that, actually, the official docs with Minimum & Maximum of VMware vSphere 6.0 is not yet released.~~ The official docs with Minimum & Maximum for VMware vSphere 6.0 has been released on 12th March 2015.

ESXi 6.0

In most cases there is 2x increase from vSphere 5.5! For each ESXi the new limits are now:

	vSphere 4.0	vSphere 4.1	vSphere 5.0	vSphere 5.1	vSphere 5.5	vSphere 6.0
Logical CPU	64	160	160	160	320	480
Physical RAM	1 TB	1 TB	2 TB	2 TB	4 TB	12 TB
NUMA Nodes			8 nodes	8 nodes	16 nodes	16 nodes
Virtual CPU	512	512	2048	2048	4096	4096
Virtual Machines	320	320	512	512	512	1024

Note that maximum physical CPUs of ESXi 6.0 will dependent on hardware at launch time. It’s used the logical CPU concept to consider also cores and hyper-threading.

New Virtual Machine Virtual Hardware (vHW 11)

For each virtual machines those are the new limits:

	vSphere 4.0	vSphere 4.1	vSphere 5.0	vSphere 5.1	vSphere 5.5	vSphere 6.0
Virtual CPU	8	8	32	64	64	128
Virtual RAM	255 GB	255 GB	1 TB	1 TB	1 TB	4 TB
Max VMDK size	2 TB – 512 B	2 TB – 512 B	2 TB – 512 B	2 TB – 512 B	62 TB	62 TB
Virtual SCSI target	60	60	60	60	60	60
Virtual NICs	10	10	10	10	10	10

The guest memory can reach 4 TB RAM to 12 TB RAM depending on partner. VMs will also add those features:

Hot-add RAM now vNUMA aware
Increased support for virtual graphics including Nvidia vGPU
WDDM 1.1 GDI acceleration features
xHCI 1.0 controller compatible with OS X 10.8+ xHCI driver
Serial and parallel port enhancements:a virtual machine can now have a maximum of 32 serial ports and serial and parallel ports can now be removed

For more information see also: vSphere 6.0 blog – Virtual Machine Virtual Hardware (vHW 11).

vCenter Server 6.0

The new vCenter Server maximums are:

	vSphere 4.0	vSphere 4.1	vSphere 5.0	vSphere 5.1	vSphere 5.5	vSphere 6.0
Hosts per vCenter	300	1000	1000	1000	1000	1000
Hosts per datacenter	100	400	500	500	500	500
Hosts per cluster	32	32	32	32	32	64
VMs per cluster	1280	3000	3000	4000	4000	8000
Powered on VMs	3000	10000	10000	10000	10000	10000
Registered VMs	4500	15000	15000	15000	15000	15000
Linked vCenter Servers	10	10	10	10	10	10

The number of powered on VMs and registered VMs could be increase using linked mode across vCenter Servers, in this case in v 5.5 the numbers are increase to 30,000 and 50,000 (and probably will be same also for version 6.0).

The vCSA version of vCenter Server will now have the same limits of the Windows installable version (also with the embedded DB!).

About the embbeded DB for the Windows version there are more information in KB 2109850 (Maximum limit of ESXi host and virtual machine used with the embedded vPostgres database in vCenter Server 6.0): The ESXi host and virtual machine limits have been increased in vCenter Server 6.0 with the vPostgres database to 20 hosts or 200 virtual machines. This is an increase from the 5 hosts or 50 virtual machines supported in vCenter Server 5.x with the embedded Microsoft SQL database.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.

VMware, vSphere none

#1 | Written by Marc Crawford about 9 years ago.

Great Information
#2 | Written by Zsolt Pamuki about 9 years ago.

Lots of scalability and performance gains in the new release as I see.
- #3 | Written by Andrea Mauro about 9 years ago.
  
  True… 2x and 4x in some points
#4 | Written by Yuri Mendoza about 9 years ago.

Hey this is a great comparison. Though I think for most real virtual environments this limits will never get reach, so they are virtually un-limited :)
- #5 | Written by Andrea Mauro about 9 years ago.
  
  Limits are high… but in some cases (VDI for example) you may need high limits
#6 | Written by Mike M about 9 years ago.

Concise and detailed quantifiable information of vSphere 6.0

Good job!

~Mike
#7 | Written by ScoZel about 9 years ago.

It is amazing how far scalability has increased since 4.0!
#8 | Written by Alex about 9 years ago.

Thanks! Those are some impressive numbers.
#9 | Written by Nicholas Korte about 9 years ago.

I am glad that VMware is continue to move forward with a great company like Nvidia when it comes to advancing the graphics on desktop virtualization.
#10 | Written by Mohamed Ibrahem about 9 years ago.

New Limits for scalability, Good Work
#11 | Written by Cris Rodriguez about 9 years ago.

Excellent comparison charts.
#12 | Written by David Cain about 9 years ago.

Thanks for not just giving the new figures, but showing the difference over older versions. Really useful to see it laid out like that.
#13 | Written by Mary Jo Gonzales about 9 years ago.

Great job with the limits for all the versions. Not that we would ever reach the new limits, we’re looking forward to the release of 6.0!
#14 | Written by Paulo Reis about 9 years ago.

With these new features, DBAs can improve database performance allowing database use more vCPU and more memory.
#15 | Written by Jay Wright about 9 years ago.

It is truly amazing how far vmware has come! Thanks for the article
#16 | Written by Andres Rojas about 9 years ago.

Well monster VMs can now become even bigger!!
nice to see the improvements on the limits that before existed in the vCSA
#17 | Written by Looneyduk about 9 years ago.

good post – showing the progression of maximums is kind of fun to see
#18 | Written by Syed Fayyaz Hussain Rizvi about 9 years ago.

Another great Post by great man :).
Thank you
- #19 | Written by Andrea Mauro about 9 years ago.
  
  Thanks
#20 | Written by Rahim about 9 years ago.

Its amazing the progression laid out like this!
#21 | Written by vervoort jurgen about 9 years ago.

WDDM 1.1 GDI acceleration features? good for VDI and high load applications? example autocad?
- #22 | Written by Andrea Mauro about 9 years ago.
  
  Yes… it’s mainly for VDI purpose.
#23 | Written by Andres Rojas about 9 years ago.

Getting bigger and bigger ! vCenter looks amazing
Monster VMs getting worst now, Im not sure this is a good thing, at leat here at work we tend to limit the size of the VMs.
#24 | Written by Ravi Venkatasubbaiah about 9 years ago.

Good list of limits. I like the comparison to prior versions
#25 | Written by Mohammed Sadiq about 9 years ago.

Nice comparision between previous versions .
#26 | Written by Geoff Neish about 9 years ago.

thank you for the list of limits
#27 | Written by Kevin Parker about 9 years ago.

Nice work here.
#28 | Written by Manoj about 9 years ago.

check this out – http://serveradda.com/vsphere-6-0-new-configuration-maximums.html
#29 | Written by Walter Harris about 9 years ago.

Hi Andre, i think i found a mistake in your first table in the coloum “vsphere 6.0” row “virtual cpu” there should also be 4096 :)
- #30 | Written by Andrea Mauro about 9 years ago.
  
  Thanks for the notification. I’ve checked and there are 4096… maybe was a typo in the first release of the doc (or was a my fault :) )
#31 | Written by Satish Kumar B about 8 years ago.

Good comparison sheet.