While Cascade Lake 8-socket wide 12 TB VMs with vSphere (ESXi) 7.0 U2/U3 are supported since October 2021, VMware removed the ESXi 7.0 U3 release from our Product Downloads site in November 2021 since select customers had encountered issues while upgrading their environments to the ESXi 7 U3 release. For details please read following vSphere team blog. Since then SAP customers where advised not to upgrade to ESXi 7.0 U3.
These issues got resolved by now and VMware had re-released ESXi 7 U3 to the market as part of vSphere 7 U3c. SAP customers can now upgrade to vSphere 7.0 U3 as part of their normal vSphere maintenance and upgrade strategy. For details check out this vSphere team post and KB 86447.
After the initial 12 TB 8-socket wide validation with Intel Cascade Lake CPU’s, SAP and VMware worked on the Intel Cooper Lake 8-socket platform validation.
This validation is by now finished and I am happy to announce the SAP support for vSphere 7.0 U2 and U3c on up to 8-socket Intel Cascade and Copper Lake based Intel standard architecture server platforms. See SAP note 3102813 for details.
Please note VMware KB 87730 (link) when you plan to use VM sizes >8 TB with Pass-Through configured network cards.
Below graphic summarizes the SAP HANA on vSphere VM size evolution from 2012* till today. With vSphere 7.0 U2/U3c you can now virtualize SAP HANA up to 12 TB large workload, which are >2 x the size** compared to previous releases.
*2012, SAP announced initial support for single Scale-Up SAP HANA systems on vSphere 5.1 for non-production environments
**The usable number vCPU’s per VM depends on the used CPU. E.g. The top bin Cascade / Cooper Lake CPU has only 28 cores. A 4-socket wide VM on a Cascade / Cooper Lake server has therefore only 224 threads available, or when running on an 8-socket server maximal up to 448 vCPUs can get used per SAP HANA VM.
