General inquiry - whats your VM / Socket (VM / Core)?

[FredPeterson]

Just thought I'd ask folks to respond on what they are doing for VM / Socket?

Myself? I'm putting a "movable" cap of 5 per socket on my single core hyper-threaded hosts.

Movable in the sense that if it becomes necessary, I will go above 5 but would rather not.

When I move to dual core that will extend to 8-10 per socket, or 4-5 per core.

[esiebert7625]

The general rule of thumb is 4 VM's per core. It really depends on how cpu intensive the VM's are. You can go all the way up to 8-10 per core if they are light VM's with not much cpu activity. Of course you then can run into other bottlenecks such as network/disk/memory.

Also see this post...

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=295986

Message was edited by:

esiebert7625

[kreischl]

I've had almost 90 VM's (Linux, Windows XP/2K/2K3 and one Netware) across 8 single core dual 3.6Ghz HS20 blades, each with 8GB RAM and had enough room for more. Included two mail servers and a few low-end MS SQL servers.

[Jae_Ellers]

Our busiest cluster is running 54 vms on 12 single core procs. RAM is more of an issue as the 48 Gb is 70% utilized and only 25% cpu is usually consumed at any one time.

I'd say your estimates are on. You will get almost as much again when double cores. In a recent vmmark test on quad cores vs dual cores the quad cores were able to run 70% more VMs. http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/07/comparing-intel.html

[FredPeterson]

I've had almost 90 VM's (Linux, Windows XP/2K/2K3 and

one Netware) across 8 single core dual 3.6Ghz HS20

blades, each with 8GB RAM and had enough room for

more. Included two mail servers and a few low-end MS

SQL servers.

Curious, what do you see for average %RDY across those 11 per socket hosts?

on another note i wish I hadn't made this a "question" - if a mod can remove that I'd appreciate it.

[kreischl]

I used the word "had" because we've since then migrated to new hardware. If I think hard enough I would say below 5%.

As far as it being question, you could assign just helpful points to everyone.

Message was edited by:

kreischl

[Cloneranger]

My main server cluster has 40 cores running 36 VMs,

My SQL cluster has 16 cores running 2 VMs,