How many virtual hosts should you put in a cluster?

How many virtual hosts should you put in a cluster?

How many virtual hosts should you put in a cluster?

Date: Jul 26, 2011

Advancements in virtualization technology now let you put more virtual hosts in a server cluster than ever before. But that doesn’t mean you should.

VMware vSphere 4.1 allows up to 32 virtual hosts in a cluster, and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Service Pack 1 allows up to 16. By adding so many virtual hosts to your server cluster, however, you force your virtualization platform to make more and more capacity calculations for load-balancing purposes. And that can hurt performance throughout your virtual server cluster.

You should also avoid putting too few virtual hosts in a cluster. Doing so can eliminate the efficiencies that a virtual server cluster brings, and it can throw a wrench into your disaster recovery plans, as well.

In this video, virtualization expert Greg Shields explains how to find the magic number of hosts for virtual server cluster sizing.

RELATED: Server cluster sizing: How many VMs is too many?

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