How many ESX hosts are you running in your HA clusters?

[savoy6]

I know that 16 is the max for HA, but I want to know how many out there have approached this limit and have you seen any issues with the HA agents after passing the 12 ESX host number in a HA cluster?

[WillemB]

We have >10 hosts working nicely with HA and DRS. No failures have occured so no real testing.

What's up with >12 hosts i'm interrested. Are you afraid for a heartbeat packet storm?

[williamarrata · Accepted solution]

I'm not sure if thats a good way to go, all into 1 cluster. I would probably break that up into 2 or 3 clusters. I also attached a Best Practices document which gives you some great information pertaining to that.

Hope that helped.

[WillemB]

I still believe best practice depends on your virtualization ratio. We have 1:10 ratio which means 10 servers need a new home when a server goes down. The resources needed by all VM's won't be available if the cluster was too small.

I'll read into the best practices since my company does not know about the 16 host limit as far as I know. It's good to be prepared.

After reading the pdf I could only note the followingLarger groups of homogenous servers will allow higher levels of

utilization across an HA/DRS enabled cluster (on average)

I did not see any negative advise against big clusters.