ESXi 4.0 Update 1 brought with it one major update (as I pointed out here). Now that 4.1 was released on July 13th, I wanted to take a look and see if anything else major has been changed.
Biggest change was they lifted the 160 VMs per host in an 8-node HA cluster. Now it’s the maximum of 320 VMs per host, and a maximum of 32 nodes per HA cluster. Problem is, they imposed a maximum of 3000 VMs per cluster (standard, HA, or DRS, they no longer differentiate them), so you’d just have to find your sweet spot to maximize how you want your cluster set up. Not that 3000 VMs per cluster is a problem, but if you ran 320 VMs on 75% of a 32-node cluster (leaving 25% for failover), that’s 7680. That’s a difference of 4680 VMs. At any rate, I’m glad they lifted the 40 VMs per host in a 9+ configuration.
The Configuration Maximums for 4.1 can be found here.
Here are some of the key features that have changed:
- VM – Addition of a USB controller with the ability to add up to 20 USB devices.
- Host – Logical CPUs has doubled to 128, essentially 64 hyperthreaded cores, thus 128 logical processing threads
- vCenter – Hosts per vCenter server has increased from 300 (on 64-bit OS) to 1000. Powered on VMs increased to 10,000 for single instance, 30,000 for linked vCenters. Concurrent provisioning operations has decreased by half to 4. Concurrent VMotions increased to 4 on a 1GB link and 8 on a 10GB link. Concurrent Storage VMotions also decreased to 2 per host, but increased to 8 per datastore. Concurrent VMotions on a VMFS3 datastore has shot WAY up to 128 from 4. Hosts per datacenter increased from 100 to 400, and concurrent client connections is now at 100.
There are more, but these are the key features that deserve an honorable mention. If there’s something you feel needs added, add a comment :)