A few nights ago, Chris Colotti and Dave Hill presented a vCloud Architecture Deep Dive brown bag session. Among the tips I picked up in that session was a comment from Chris that my most favorite VMware document of all time had been updated within the last 6 weeks – vSphere 5 Configuration Maximums. Basically what was added was the inclusion of vCloud Director configuration maximums:
| Item | Maximum |
| Virtual machine count | 20,000 |
| Powered‐On virtual machine count | 10,000 |
| Organizations | 10,000 |
| Virtual machines per vApp | 64 |
| vApps per organization | 500 |
| Number of networks | 7,500 |
| Hosts | 2,000 |
| vCenter Servers | 25 |
| Virtual Data Centers | 10,000 |
| Datastores | 1,024 |
| Catalogs | 1,000 |
| Media | 1,000 |
| Users | 10,000 |
If you’ve been following the progression of this document, you will have noticed that VMware has been adding more application layer components to it. That is because VMware has broadened its cloud platform portfolio which is fundamentally dependent on vSphere. Chris mentioned this in his lecture and I began noticing it a few years ago, vCenter now extends beyond just a tier 2 management application. It has become a tier 1 cornerstone for other VMware and partner ecosystem cloud applications and infrastructure tools. Be mindful of this during the design phase and do not neglect its resource and redundancy requirements as your scale your vCloud environment.
Enjoy. And by the way, Chris has a Dell T310 Server with 20GB RAM for sale. Check it out.
