Chapter 1. System Considerations

At VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, VMware presented to the world the VMworld Data Center (see Figure 1.1). There existed within this conference data center close to 40,000 virtual machines (VMs) running within 512 Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blades within 64 USC chassis. Included in this data center were eight racks of disks, as well as several racks of HP blades and Dell 1U servers, all connected to a Cisco Nexus 7000 switch. Granted, this design was clearly to show off UCS, but it showed that with only 32 racks of servers that it is possible to run up to 40,000 VMs.

Figure 1.1. Where the Virtual Infrastructure touches the physical world