Number of Virtual Machines in comparison to Network Adapters

[_jmorgan_]

Does anyone have any idea on how many virtual machines VMware recomends per physical network adapter? For example if I had a vswitch with only one physical network adapter attached how many virtuals could I run on there before I would run into trouble??

Thanks

[weinstein5]

depends - how much network traffic you are expecting from your vms - in my expereince for mos common vms you will run out memory or disk resource before you will tax your network resources -

[_jmorgan_]

Yea thats my problem I have plenty of memory/cpu/disk resources but I am limited on network adapters. I am running Virtual XP Desktops on my esx hosts that get connected to via thin clients. Was just curious if I could get away with having 30 to 40 VM's using one adapter. Guess I will just have to test and see how it goes.

[weinstein5]

I think you will be able to - have you ever watched your network through put on your workstation adapter?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

It takes quite a bit of sustained traffic to fill up a gigabit connection.... However, the VC Performance Tab, network graph will be your friend in this.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization