how many vm are recommended to run on esx server

[manishisarda]

Hi,

Are no of VMs running propotinal to no of CPUs available on physical box ? Or it is decided by the application running on top of VM ?

What are the best practices availbale for different applications tiers, Any white paper ?

Thanks

[Karunakar]

Hi,

The maximum number of VM's which can be created in the esx is dependent up on the configuration of the VM.

Depends on processor, and memory assigned to the vm.

For best practises, try to read a document on resource management of ESx server.

this would be available on www.vmware.com/support

-Karunakar

[weinstein5]

vmware recommends 4-8 vms per core - from the configuration maximums- http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf- vmware states 192 virtual cpus per esx server and 170 total vms - what really is coing to determine the number of vms that can run on the esx server is going to be the resources required by the vm and the amount of the resources you do have on your esx server - in my experience cpu has not been the limiting resource I have found usually you will run into resource contention with memory or disk bandwidth -

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[TomHowarth]

VMware have jsut released 3.5 U3 this has increased the number of vCPU that can run per pCPU or Core taken from the release notes

Increase in vCPU per Core Limit —

The limit on vCPUs per core has been raised from 8 (or 11 for VDI workloads) to 20. This change only raises the supported limit but does not include any additional performance optimizations. Raising the limit allows users more flexibility to configure systems based on specific workloads and to get the most advantage from increasingly faster processors. The achievable number of vCPUs per core will depend on the workload and specifics of the hardware. It is expected that most deployments will remain within the previous range of 8-11 vCPUs per core. For more information, see VI3 Performance Best Practices and Benchmarking Guidelines.

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[Cameron2007]

Have a look at this post for sizing considerations

Also under Update 3 the max vCPU's per core has been increased

Hope this helps

[TomHowarth]

yes, the current maximum that can be run is 20vCPUs per Core (release note of 3.5 U3). however you would be hard pushed to get that sort of numbers. it is more reasonable to assume between 8 - 10 vCPUs per core.

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator