- What's New in This Release
- Configuration Maximum Differences from VI3
- Understanding the Licensing Changes
- Summary
Configuration Maximum Differences from VI3
We already covered many of the features and enhancements in vSphere and how they differ from VI3, but there are also many maximum configuration differences that you should be aware of. VMware publishes a configuration maximum document for each version that lists the maximums for VMs, hosts, and vCenter Servers. vSphere saw a number of these maximums increase, which really made a big difference in how well it could scale and the workloads it could handle. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 display the key configuration maximum differences between VI 3.5 and vSphere.
Table 1.1. Virtual Machine Configuration Maximum Differences
Virtual Machine |
VI 3.5 |
vSphere 4 |
Virtual CPUs per VM |
4 |
8 |
RAM per VM |
64GB |
255GB |
NICs per VM |
4 |
10 |
Concurrent remote console sessions |
10 |
40 |
Table 1.2. ESX Host and vCenter Server Configuration Maximum Differences
ESX Host and vCenter Server |
VI 3.5 |
vSphere 4 |
Hosts per storage volume |
32 |
64 |
Fibre Channel paths to LUN |
32 |
16 |
NFS datastores |
32 |
64 |
Hardware iSCSI initiators per host |
2 |
4 |
Virtual CPUs per host |
192 |
512 |
VMs per host |
170 |
320 |
Logical processors per host |
32 |
64 |
RAM per host |
256GB |
1TB |
Standard vSwitches per host |
127 |
248 |
vNICs per standard vSwitch |
1,016 |
4,088 |
Resource pools per host |
512 |
4,096 |
Children per resource pool |
256 |
1,024 |
Resource pools per cluster |
128 |
512 |
The biggest differences in vSphere are the number of VMs that you can have per host and the amount of RAM and number of CPUs that you can assign to a VM. There is an important caveat to the number of VMs per host, though: If you have a single cluster that exceeds more than eight hosts, you can have only 40 VMs per host. Be aware of this limitation when sizing your host hardware and designing your virtual environment.