QLogic 2600 Series vSphere 5 Virtual Server Engine - Manual (Page 16)

Linear Scalability
The improvement factor for RAM memory per VM for vSphere 5.1—
addressing the biggest issue in scaling VMs.
8X
More Virtual CPUs for Scaling Tier-1 Apps with vSphere 5
If you’re concerned about hosting tier-1 apps on VMs, the argument about virtualizing tier-1 apps is over.
Even flagship enterprise applications such as SAP, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012, and Exchange 2010 have
adopted server virtualization as a best practice. As an example, the CPU, memory, storage, and networking
requirements are well documented by
SAP .
More VMs with vSphere, Xeon E5, and QLogic Server Adapters
Fabric-based networks are a fundamental requirement in supporting highly virtualized data centers. Fibre
Channel SANs are the nucleus of the next-generation vSphere 5.1 data center. If your goal is to increase VM
density, vSphere 5.1 combined with the latest generation of servers and QLogic server adapters allow you to
more than double the number of VMs per server while enjoying the same level of performance.
vSphere 5.1 will enable your businesses to leverage the built-in architecture of both products to increase
availability, improve agility, and overcome scalability and performance concerns.
vSphere 5.1 delivers improvements on all key virtualization metrics—making I/O performance critical.
vSphere Version vSphere 4 vSphere 5.1 Factor
Host
HW Logical Processors 64 160 LPs 5x
Physical Memory 1TB 4TB 4x
Virtual CPUs per Host 512 2048 4x
VM
Virtual CPUs per VM 8 64 8x
Memory per VM 255GB 2TB 8x
Active VMs per Host 320 512 1.7x
Cluster
Max Nodes 32 32 1x
Max VMs 1280 4,000 3x