Updated Requirements and Limits for Virtual Machines and Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2
Last week during the VDI day I still mentioned that we only supported 64 virtual machines running on a clustered Hyper-V infrastructure. Well we’ve changed the support limits of virtual machines running in a clustered environment towards 1000 VM’s per cluster and still a max of 384 VM’s on each node.
Below you can find the table that explains the max limit for failover clusters. Have a look at the full table on the TechNet library
Failover Clusters and Hyper-V
The following table lists the maximums that apply to highly available servers running Hyper-V. It is important to do capacity planning to ensure that there will be enough hardware resources to run all the virtual machines in a clustered environment. For more information about requirements for failover clusters and Hyper-V, see Hyper-V: Using Hyper-V and Failover Clustering (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=129063).
| Component | Maximum | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Nodes per cluster |
16 |
Consider the number of nodes you want to reserve for failover, as well as maintenance tasks such as applying updates. We recommend that you plan for enough resources to allow for 1 node to be reserved for failover, which means it remains idle until another node is failed over to it. (This is sometimes referred to as a passive node.) You can increase this number if you want to reserve additional nodes. There is no recommended ratio or multiplier of reserved nodes to active nodes; the only specific requirement is that the total number of nodes in a cluster cannot exceed the maximum of 16. |
Running virtual machines per cluster and per node |
1,000 per cluster, with a maximum of 384 on any one node |
Several factors can affect the real number of virtual machines that can be run at the same time on one node, such as:
|