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musesinspire
Contributor
Contributor

How Many VMs Can I Run With The Following Specs?

I tried to read the BP that VMware provides, but it reads like surround sound stereo installation instructions.  I don't need an exact number, just a good estimate, if possible.

10 HP Proliant DL360 G6 Servers

These each consist of:

o CPU COURES: 8 CPUs x 2.533 GHz

o PROCESSORS: Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU

o MEMORY: 64GB

o HYPERTHREADING: Active

o PROCESSOR SOCKETS: 2

o CORES PER SOCKET: 4

o LOGICAL PROCESSORS: 16

o NICs: 2

We have a SAN that is broken into 4 datastores at 2TB each.

I'm running ESXi 5.0 U1 on  the servers.  The virtual environment is Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.  There are 2 DC, AV server (Symantec), WSUS server, KMS.  Other software being utilized are Oracle, SQL, Sharepoint and MS Project.

I had done some basic calculations based on what I could make heads and tails of and I was approximating, based on those specifications, that I could probably do close to 200+ per host as they are not really running any search engines, etc and be safely within utilization parameters.  Yes, a couple of them are application/web servers, with most of them having 150 - 200GB disk drives and generally 4GB of RAM on each one. The problem is, that seems kind of high to me.

Anyone wanna help me estimate?

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!

To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer. ~Dan Rather
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1 Reply
DavoudTeimouri
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi,

VM sizing is different for your client virtual machines and server virtual machines.

I mean, may be you need to more than 4 GB memory for some virtual machines.

But based on your explanation, you can run 4-5 VMs per physical core and also run 16 VMs per host (According to their memory size).

But you should consider that you need to reserve fail-over capacity for HA. So I think, you can run 12 virtual machines without any problem and affecting failover resources.

I recommend, you have to read VMware best practices document about deploying virtual machines and vSphere Design books.

Also a calculator is available at myvirtualcloud.net which provided for VDI but you can use it for your infrastructure.

Davoud

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Davoud Teimouri - https://www.teimouri.net - Twitter: @davoud_teimouri Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teimouri.net/
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