Shares

Yes, with vSphere 6.5 there are new VMware vSphere 6.5 Configuration Maximums. While it is not really important to have even bigger-than-monster VMs, it is still good to know what's the biggest file size, what's the biggest number of VMs that can be managed by single vCenter VMs etc. My post will not list everything as you can download the VMware 6.5 configuration maximums, but the paper has 35 pages.

I'll try to sum some important sections from the paper. Usually, you don't hit those numbers during average sized environments, but some use cases could make to hit those limits. One of those limits would be when Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) are used. Or (and) also within environments where IT admins have running a limited number of VMs per datastore. You could easily hit this limit when 8 paths to each device are used. A previous release of vSphere has had a limit of 256 devices and 1024 paths. vSphere 6.5 extends this to 2000.

VMware vSphere 6.5 Configuration Maximums

VMware Virtual Machine Maximums

Number of vCPU per VM = 128

RAM per VM = 6128 Gb

Virtual NVMa per VM = 4 (Yes I know, I haven't detailed that yet, but seems cool as vSphere can emulate NVMe based storage).

Virtual NVMe Targets per VM = 128

Virtual NVMe targets per vidrtual SCSi adapter = 15

Video Memory per VM = 2Gb (vSphere 6.0 had 512Mb)

ESXi Hosts Maximums

Logical CPUs per host = 576

Virtual CPU per host = 4096

NUMA nodes per host = 16

VMs per host = 1024

pRAM per host = 12 TB

vCenter Server Maximums

Hosts per vCenter server = 2000

Powered On VMs per vCenter = 25000

Registered VMs per vCenter = 35000

Linked vCenter servers = 10

Number of ESXi hosts per Datacenter = 2000

Concurrent operations

vMotion operations er host (1GbE) = 4

vMotion operations per host (10GbE) = 8

Platform Service Controller (PSC)

Maximum PSCs per vSphere Domain = 10

Maximum PSCs per site, behind a load balancer = 4

VMware vSAN Maximums

Virtual SAN disk groups per host = 5

Magnetic disks per disk group = 7

SSD disks per disk group = 1

Number of iSCSI LUNs per Cluster = 1024 (VSAN can iSCSI now !! )

Number of iSCSI Targets per Cluster = 128

Number of iSCSI LUNs per Target = 256

Max iSCSI LUN size = 62 TB

Number of iSCSI sessions per Node = 1024

iSCSI IO queue depth per Node = 4096

Number of outstanding writes per iSCSI LUN = 128

Number of outstanding IOs per iSCSI LUN = 256

Number of initiators who register PR key for a iSCSI LUN = 64

As being said, the full document has 35 pages and can be downloaded from this link (direct link) – vSphere 6.5 Configuration Maximums.

vSphere 6.5 ESX Virtualization Resources:

We have put a dedicated WordPress page on our blog to facilitate to find dedicated resources about vSphere 6.5. You can find it below.

Installs, upgrades, migrations….

Here are some of the already published resources, but there is more added. Below is not the complete list. The individual blog posts are detailed step by step guides, where some of them include videos.

VMware vSphere 6.5

Those are a blog posts which were created after the series of VMware briefings (under NDA). We had a number of sessions before the official launch, where we could ask questions. We had access to the presenter's slides and the recordings in order to be able to write about those features.

Stay tuned through RSS, and social media channels (Twitter, FB, YouTube)

Shares