If you look at the VM resource configuration maximums over the years there have some big jumps in the sizes of the 4 main resource groups with each major vSphere release. With vSphere 5.0 the term “Monster VM” was coined as the number of virtual CPUs and the amount of memory that could be assigned to a VM took a big jump from 8 vCPUs to 32 vCPUs and from 255GB of memory to 1 TB of memory. The number of vCPUs further increased to 64 with the vSphere 5.1 release.
One resource that has stayed the same over the releases going back all the way to vSphere 3.0 (and beyond?) is the virtual disk size which has been limited to 2TB. With the release of vSphere 5.5, the maximum vCPUs and memory has stayed the same but the size of a virtual disk has finally been increased to 62TB. That increase has been long awaited as previously the only way to use bigger disks with a VM with using a RDM. So while the Monster VM may have not had it’s brains increased in this release, the amount it can pack away in its belly sure got a whole lot bigger!
