Guest VM to HyperV host ratio?

[DavePa]

What is considered a reasonable number of guests to hosts? Obviously depends on the RAM / HDD space available but let's assume for a minute that there are lots of both. If I wanted the following servers on a Windows 2012r2 host system:

 

DC (8gb RAM, 100gb HDD)

Staff File/Print (16gb RAM, 1tb HDD)

Student Fie/Print (16gb RAM, 500gb hDD)

SQL (16Ggb RAM, 500gb HDD)

SCCM (32gb RAM, 500gb HDD)

Impero (16gb RAM, 200gb HDD)

Plus another 1/2 dozen small servers/guests needing no more than 8gb/200gb each

 

So 12 guests - too much for a single host that has 256gb RAM, and 12tb HDD? There are only 6 NIC available so some servers will need to share a NIC but is that an issue?

 

Our problem is we have quite a few guests and also (finally) more than enough hosts. For licencing purposes it would be good to minimise the number of hosts but I do not want to overload them - but equally, having a 256gb server that has 12tb of HDD space seems overkill for a DC and a file/print. My typical rule has been to not allocate more than I have which was fine when our hosts had 32gb of RAM, 1tb of storage and 6 NICs but these days our servers have far more memory and HDD space (although typically still only 6 NICs) but I am still only using 2 or 3 guests per host.

[Davit2005]

We use VMWare and some hosts with 256GB running 14VM's. 8 X 1GB Nics

[DavePa]

Thanks for that, I think I'll look to populate them more fully that I presently do - maybe 24 guests over 3 or 4 hosts rather than the present 8 hosts. I'll find a use for the spare machines without any problem

[Steve21]

Think a lot depends how much the VMs are actually using, if they're ticking at say 5% CPU it's differnet to 100%.

 

We run 40 VMs on 2 HOSTs (128GB RAM, 8x 1GB) without a problem (Looking to move to 3 just for expansion wise and more flexibility)

 

Steve