How many guests

[seanmcd]

I have HP DL380 G6's for hosts, with 2 quad core (x5560's) cpu's, and 72gb ram. They are fiber connected to the san.

We've been using VMWare ESX for test servers but not in production as of yet.

The question I'm always asked is - "how many guests can you run on one of the hosts"

My answer has been about 20 per... Do you think that's close? Is there any tool or "calculator" that will give an accurate answer?

 

[SpaceHonkey]

My findings are that in general, RAM will be the biggest source of contention. Most of our VMs are light on CPU and disk.

The other thing we have to consider with our smaller setup is to plan for failure. You must leave enough room for the other hosts to pick up the slack. With 2 equal hosts, no resource should have greater than 50% average utilization; 3 = 66%, etc...

 

[ManateeMatt]

I too have found for my test lab I run out of ram before cpu and disk, but that's a test lab. I have been trying to find out the answer to this question as we are planning on doing a full scale deployment of vSphere.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device

 

[NetJunkie]

There is no magic number. Some people can run 5 or 6, others can run 40 or 50. A VMware partner can run a "Capacity Planner" against your existing production environment and come up with a very solid conslidation ratio estimation.