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.
See also: