vSphere 6.5 Configuration Maximums – Compare to Earlier Versions- Part 1
Each version of vSphere has some improvements and one of important improvements are configuration maximums that allows administrators to have much bigger virtual machines, hosting more virtual machines, use faster network and storage connections.
This is very important that you should aware about your current configuration maximums because you can prepare your forecast plans for increasing virtual machine or ESXi host resources or even changes on network or SAN environments based on these configuration maximums.
Lets review latest vSphere configuration maximums and compare them with earlier versions.
Virtual Machine
| Item | vSphere 5.5 | vSphere 6.0 | vSphere 6.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| vCPU | 64 | 128 | 128 |
| Memory | 1TB | 4TB | 6128GB |
| Swap File | 1TB | 4TB | 6128GB |
| Virtual SCSI adapters per virtual machine | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Virtual SCSI targets per virtual SCSI adapter | 15 | 15 | 15 |
| Virtual SCSI targets per virtual machine | 60 | 60 | 60 |
| Virtual disk size | 62TB | 62TB | 62TB |
| IDE controllers per virtual machine | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| IDE devices per virtual machine | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Floppy controllers per virtual machine | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Floppy devices per virtual machine | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Virtual SATA adapters per virtual machine | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Virtual SATA devices per virtual SATA adapter | 30 | 30 | 30 |
| Virtual NICs per virtual machine | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| USB host controllers per virtual machine | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| USB devices connected to a virtual machine | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| Parallel ports per virtual machine | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Serial ports per virtual machine | 4 | 32 | 32 |
| Concurrent remote console connections to a virtual machine | 40 | 40 | 40 |
| Video memory per virtual machine | 512MB | 512MB | 2GB |
As you can see on the above table, maximum memory size is larger than earlier version. Six times bigger than vSphere 5.5!
Also if you have virtual desktop (VDI) in your environment, you can improve user experience by upgrade to vSphere 6.5 because you can assign maximum 2GB video memory instead of 512MB.
vSphere 6.5 allows you add “Virtual RDMA Adapter” but just one adapter per each machine.
If you want to know what is RDMA and vRDMA, you can read this link for more information.
vSphere 6.5 supports NVMe devices and you can add:
- 4 x Virtual NVMe adapters per virtual machine
- 15 x Virtual NVMe targets per virtual SCSI adapter
- 60 x Virtual NVMe targets per virtual machine
Note: Please consider that configuration maximums maybe not supported by guest OS.
ESXi Host
Compute Maximums
| Item | vSphere 5.5 | vSphere 6.0 | vSphere 6.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Host CPU maximums | |||
| Logical CPUs per host | 320 | 480 | 576 |
| NUMA Nodes per host | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Virtual machine maximums | |||
| Virtual machines per host | 512 | 1024 | 1024 |
| Virtual CPUs per host | 4096 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Virtual CPUs per core | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Fault Tolerance maximums | |||
| Virtual disks | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Virtual CPUs per virtual machine | 1 | 4 | 4 |
| RAM per FT VM | 64GB | 64GB | 64GB |
| Virtual machines per host | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Virtual CPU per host | 8 | 8 |
Each ESXi 6.5 can have 576 logical processor, that means, you can use servers with more logical cores and hosting virtual machines with more virtual cores totally.
FT has improvements but the improvements are not about FT maximums in vSphere 6.5 .
You can find more information in “What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5” white paper.
Memory Maximum
| Item | vSphere 5.5 | vSphere 6.0 | vSphere 6.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| RAM per host | 4TB | 6TB | 12TB |
| Number of swap files per VM | 1 | 1 | 1 |
About host memory, you can use 12TB memory on each ESXi 6.5 host from now but this is not an improvement actually because you could use this amount of memory if you was using OEM hardware in vSphere 6.0 .
Storage Maximum
| Item | vSphere 5.5 | vSphere 6.0 | vSphere 6.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual Disks per Host | 2048 | 2048 | 2048 |
| iSCSI | |||
| LUNs per server | 256 | 256 | 512 |
| NICs that can be associated or port bound with the software iSCSI stack per server | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Number of total paths on a server | 1024 | 1024 | 2048 |
| Number of paths to a LUN (software iSCSI and hardware iSCSI) | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Software iSCSI targets | 256 | 256 | 256 |
| NAS | |||
| NFS mounts per host | 256 | 256 | 256 |
| Fibre Channel | |||
| LUNs per host | 256 | 256 | 512 |
| LUN size | 64TB | 64TB | 64TB |
| LUN ID | 255 | 1023 | 0 to 16383 |
| Number of paths to a LUN | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Number of total paths on a server | 1024 | 1024 | 2048 |
| Number of HBAs of any type | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| HBA ports | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Targets per HBA | 256 | 256 | 256 |
| FCoE | |||
| Software FCoE adapters | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Common VMFS | |||
| Volume size | 64TB | 64TB | 64TB |
| Volumes per host | 256 | 256 | 512 |
| Hosts per volume | 64 | 64 | 64 |
| Powered on virtual machines per VMFS volume | 2048 | 2048 | 2048 |
| Concurrent vMotion operations per VMFS volume | 128 | 128 | 128 |
VMFS 6 has been introduced in current version and there is some new features but there is no big change about VMFS 3 and VMFS 5.
A big change is number of path that increased from 1024 to 2048. More path is equal to more reliability.
Also more LUN per server, so you can have more LUNs and more paths and so more storage space totally.
This was part 1 of reviewing vSphere 6.5 configuration maximums and we’ll review and compare the rest of items in the next parts.
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