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Redmond reveals Hyper-V 2016 beats vSphere's RAM and CPU count

It's not how big you are, it's what you do with it that counts

Microsoft has revealed the scale at which Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 will operate at release and in so doing has leapfrogged VMware's scalability on headline-grabbing numbers.

Microsoft's spelled out its scale here and we've referred to VMware's Configuration Maximums vSphere 6.0 (PDF) document for Virtzilla's numbers.

Here's the tale of the tape, in a table.

Windows Server 2016 VSphere 6.0
Host memory per server 24TB 6TB or 12TB on specific hardware
Logical processors 512 480
Maximum guest memory per VM 16TB 4TB
Guest logical CPUs 240 128

That data suggests Microsoft has VMware covered, for now and on simple metrics of scale.

We say “for now” because a new release of vSphere is imminent, but probably not so imminent it will debut at next weeks's VMworld USA. And we say “simple metrics” because VMs-per-host, disks-per-host vCPUs-per-core and lots of other metrics play important roles in the scalability of a server virtualisation platform.

Microsoft says it thinks you will use its newfound size for "interesting new scenarios around data analytics and machine learning, which means really huge databases."

Which are hardly mainstream workloads, making these numbers something VMware can shrug off. It probably won't because the company has made much over the years of vSphere's ability to handle "monster" workloads.

For now, however, Microsoft can probably claim bragging rights in the server-virtualisation-at-scale caper, which will sweeten its new vSphere-to-Hyper-V migration offer. ®

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