Note the host maximums don’t line up with the cluster maximums, 64 hosts x 1000 VMs per host equals 64000 VMs, the 8000 VMs is a limitation of vCenter Server not of the ESXi hosts. vSphere 5.5 supported only 32 hosts and 4000 VMs per cluster, vSphere 6 doubles that to 64 hosts and 8000 VMs in a cluster. It’s not just host maximums that are increasing in vSphere 6, cluster sizes are increasing as well. While this is greatly increased I’m not sure there are many people brave enough to put that many VMs on a single host, imagine the fun of HA having to handle that many when a host fails. Finally the maximum number of VMs per host increases from 512 in vSphere 5.5 to 1000 VMs per host in vSphere 6. In vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported # of logical (physical) CPUs per host was 320 CPUs, in vSphere 6 that increases to 480 CPUs. In vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported host memory was 4TB, in vSphere 6 that jumps up to 12TB. We’ve had monster VMs in the past that could be sized ridiculously large, now we’re getting monster hosts as well.
Note while vSphere 6 has now been formally announced, it will not GA and be publicly available until March. The following is a summary of some of the big things that are new in vSphere 6, I’ll be doing additional posts that focus specifically on VSAN and VVOLs. While the vSphere 6 release is very storage focused with big improvements to VSAN and the launch of the VVOLs architecture there are still plenty of other things that make this an exciting release. VSphere 6 is the newest major release of vSphere since vSphere 5.5 and with any major release it comes packed with lots of new and enhanced features along with increased scalability.