Remember that cool project with VMware, HP Enterprise, and IBM where four super huge monster virtual machines (VMs) of 120 vCPUs each were all running at the same time on a single server with great performance?
That was Project Capstone, and it was presented at VMworld San Francisco and VMworld Barcelona last fall as a spotlight session. The follow-up whitepaper is now completed and published, which means that there are lots of great technical details available with testing results and analysis.
In addition to the four 120 vCPU VMs test, additional configurations were also run with eight 60 vCPU VMs and sixteen 30 vCPU VMs. This shows that plenty of large VMs can be run on a single host with excellent performance when using a solution that supports tons of CPU capacity and cutting edge flash storage.
The whitepaper not only contains all of the test results from the original presentation, but also includes additional details around the performance of CPU Affinity vs PreferHT and under-provisioning. There is also a best practices section that if focused on running monster VMs.