Max port-groups for ESX/ESXI ?

[beaven67]

I was reading through some documentation somewhere and noticed that it stated that esx could only support 256 port-groups. Does anyone know if this is true or if this is just the max value of esx 4.0? If its the max for 4-5.x what are some possible ways to work around this issue. I help in maintaining an environment that uses at least 160 port-groups right now and it keeps growing. I see this as a reason to start another cluster versus just adding servers to an existing cluster. Any Idea's?:smileyshocked:

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Note: This discussion was moved from the VMware Knowledge Base community to the VMware vSphere™ vNetwork community.

Good Luck!

[PduPreez]

Does each port group represent a different VLAN in you environment?

Have a look at the maximum configuration for vSphere 4.1

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf Page 5

Port groups per standard switch = 512

That means you should be fine with port groups if you run on vSphere 4.1

While we are on this discussion I looked at vSphere 5 maximums

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r50/vsphere-50-configuration-maximums.pdf Page 5

Port groups per standard switch   =  256

It looks like the maximum was changed to 256.

What I would suggest is to start looking at distributed switches vDS

Although I can see the max port groups in vSphere 5 document, the vSphere 4.1 maximum is 5000

Static or Dynamic Port groups per distributed switch = 5000

In Summary

If you need to use that many port groups because of VLANs I would suggest to start looking at Virtual Distributed Switches

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[beaven67]

Thanks for the reply, I finally found all the same information. Its unfortunate that that they limit the standard virtual switch as there are some vendors that have switches that can utilize the standard virtual switch and pull the port group configuration into there configuration automatically as they are created on one esx host. This elliminates one benefit of using the distributed switch versus the standard switch.