How Many VMs Can I Run With The Following Specs?

[musesinspire]

I tried to read the BP that VMware provides, but it reads like surround sound stereo installation instructions.  I don't need an exact number, just a good estimate, if possible.

10 HP Proliant DL360 G6 Servers

These each consist of:

o CPU COURES: 8 CPUs x 2.533 GHz

o PROCESSORS: Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU

o MEMORY: 64GB

o HYPERTHREADING: Active

o PROCESSOR SOCKETS: 2

o CORES PER SOCKET: 4

o LOGICAL PROCESSORS: 16

o NICs: 2

We have a SAN that is broken into 4 datastores at 2TB each.

I'm running ESXi 5.0 U1 on  the servers.  The virtual environment is Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.  There are 2 DC, AV server (Symantec), WSUS server, KMS.  Other software being utilized are Oracle, SQL, Sharepoint and MS Project.

I had done some basic calculations based on what I could make heads and tails of and I was approximating, based on those specifications, that I could probably do close to 200+ per host as they are not really running any search engines, etc and be safely within utilization parameters.  Yes, a couple of them are application/web servers, with most of them having 150 - 200GB disk drives and generally 4GB of RAM on each one. The problem is, that seems kind of high to me.

Anyone wanna help me estimate?

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!

[Davoud Teimouri]

Hi,

VM sizing is different for your client virtual machines and server virtual machines.

I mean, may be you need to more than 4 GB memory for some virtual machines.

But based on your explanation, you can run 4-5 VMs per physical core and also run 16 VMs per host (According to their memory size).

But you should consider that you need to reserve fail-over capacity for HA. So I think, you can run 12 virtual machines without any problem and affecting failover resources.

I recommend, you have to read VMware best practices document about deploying virtual machines and vSphere Design books.

Also a calculator is available at myvirtualcloud.net which provided for VDI but you can use it for your infrastructure.

Davoud