asked on

In ESX 3.5, is there a limit of virtual machines? I am running into a problem where I have 58 vm's on a host, and when I add the 59th, the virtual NIC on the guest drops its connection.

I have 58 virtual XP desktops running on a single ESX host. I have the resources to add many more, but when I attempt to add the 59th guest machine, the virtual NIC on the guest becomes disconnected. I did find where there is a 256 MAC address limit per host, so it is not that. Anyone else have a similar problem? Is there a checkbox or setting I am missing somewhere?

Patrick49er

How many physical NICs do you have on the ESX server? Do you have your service console on a dedicated NIC like it is advised?

Patrick49er

According this document, there is a 60 VM limit. Here is the document with all the information:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_config_max.pdf

kckip

ASKER

In response to Patrick49er: I have 1 NIC configured as the service console, and 4 NIC's configured for vm data traffic. These are all 1GB connections. Thanks for the document, but the 60 limit refers to devices connected to a virtual machine, not the limit of virtual machines per host.

Patrick49er

Ack! You are right. Serves me best to read it more carefully. ;-) There is a vCPU limit of 128, but since I doubt you are assigning 2 vCPUs per XP machine, that wouldn't put you at the limit either.

The following link has a discussion on VMware's community. Some good discussion there that boils down to it basically depending on what physical hardware you have your ESX server running on and how much resources are installed. It also depends on how much resource you allocate to your VMs.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/170137

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION