How many VM's can you boot simultaneously

[NNy2k]

So this weekend we're moving our ESX servers to a new datacenter, SAN, network and all.

We have 7 ESX hosts running vSphere 4.1 with 13-16 VM's (All Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2) on each host.

Is there any best practice advice for booting the VM's ?

We are thinking 3-4 per host at a time so we don't cripple the ESX hosts.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Joe

[Troy_Clavell]

you don't want to put yourself into a boot storm and overwhelm the SAN.  I would suggest powering on maybe  4 - 5 guests at a time, max

[idle-jam]

3-5 is something that we follow (and i think should work well generally). it really depends on the hosts specs as well as how robust the SAN storage is.

[NNy2k]

Thanks so much. This is what we thought as well but just wanted to make sure we weren't over thinking it.

- Joe