[POLL] What is your average VM size?

[Gostev]

Please help us to estimate average provisioned VM size within our customer base. The goal here is to find out what is the maximum size threshold for the majority of VMs out there (not counting exceptions). We need to understand this for planning around one new technology we are developing. Thank you for your help!

[averylarry]

Used or Provisioned?
Including the main backup repository?

[averylarry]

Wouldn't mean or some type of weighted average help more? Most of my VMs are under 200Gb provisioned, but I have 2 VMs that are just huge.

Maybe a straight count would work better. How many VMs do you have that are:
under 20
20-49
50-99
...

[Vitaliy S.]

Used or Provisioned?
Including the main backup repository?

I don't think it matters, just the average size of the VM. Is your repository also a VM? You can include that as well, we just want to understand the general distribution of disks size.

Wouldn't mean or some type of weighted average help more? Most of my VMs are under 200Gb provisioned, but I have 2 VMs that are just huge.

You can skip these two VMs, and vote for 100 or 200 then.

[Gostev]

Please vote excluding the Veeam backup repository VM (and it is a bad practice anyway to store backups withing VMFS)

Between used or provisioned, I'd say I am after provisioned here, because this tells me how big do you expect the VM to grow in worst-case scenario. I have updated the poll description.

And yes, I am after the majority of your VMs. I realize there will be exceptions, in fact our IT has just informed me we have our own "exceptional" 6TB VM, but all the rest are pretty similar and quite small. Their average size is the value I am after.

Thank you!

[averylarry]

Sounds like you care about virtual disks sizes.

I have a lot of 50Gb virtual disks for OS/boot drives, and a bunch of 50-250Gb data disks. Then there are a few outliers.

[Gostev]

No, actually total VM size is what I am looking (sum of provisioned across all disks).
By the way, if anyone has voted incorrectly, I have enabled ability to change your vote.

[dellock6]

Anton, just as an additional source for informations, there is this nice project that is collecting real values submitted by 300 users:

http://dash.vopendata.org/

Average size there is 73 GB (click on VMDK in upper right to see details on that statistics).

Luca.

[Gostev]

I've seen that, but this provides average VMDK size, not average VM size (VMs usually have multiple VMDKs).

[emachabert]

Hi,

I took one hour to connect to multiple infrastructures, select the virtual machines view for each Datacenter, then export to Excel, and then Excel does the magic:
Over 2347 VM I have this average VM size (allocated): 103,0441767 GB

hope this helps

[dellock6]

I'll do the math for you Anton

671 vmdks per vCenter and 415 VMs per vCenter = 1,6168 VMDKs per VM = 73,19 GB per VMDK = 118,333592 GB per VM

Luca.

[emachabert]

I removed every VM that was over 1TB

[emachabert]

Luca,

these numbers are very close of what I see, I used RVtools on three vcenter cumulating 750VMs, using the vDisk tab I've got an average vmdk size of 73,28GB (we are in the matrix)

[Gostev]

I removed every VM that was over 1TB

Out of curiosity, how many of those do you have?
And thanks for your scientific approach

[dellock6]

Eric,
well that site is polling a large number of VMs, so it's expected any infrastructure is near that number.
As an example, when talking about sizing with Tom Sightler for example, we both use 100 GB as a "rule of thumb" in VM size. It's also really an easy number to be used

Oh, and there is a trend in it, when that site first started more than a year ago, average VMDK size was 60 GB. Give the users more space, and they will use it

Luca.

[emachabert]

Yes I knew that website because HP often use it as an example (you can see they are first at storage and first at servers)

Anton, if i don't remove those huge VM, the average size goes up to 189GB. On 2347 VM, i had 58 VM over 1 TB ( 2,3%)

[Gostev]

Thanks a bunch Eric, this is incredibly useful.

[lp@albersdruck.de]

Very small environment here, average VM size is a bit under 50 GB for 18 VMs.
There are two very large VMs though, a file server and our main application's one which both are over 3TB in size each.

I selected 50 GB average.

[Gostev]

Results are almost not changing as more people vote, still 90% of VMs appear to be 200GB and less in size. I guess this is the number I was looking for...

[bd134492]

From vCenter operations maanger
For 3,394 VM
VM Configured Disk Size 73 GB
VM Disk Space Usage 38 GB
VM Disk Space Provisioned 88 GB

Barry

[Tobias_Elfstrom]

For around 800 VM Avg. VM Disk Space Allocation is just shy of 250 GB

[Peejay62]

appx. 1500VMs averaging 177GB.. There are some VMs crossing the 5 and even 10TB boundary though..

[feelgood]

about 50 between 20 GB and 100 GB, about three around 300 GB, two above 1.5 TB.

[MaartenK]

Arround 350VMs with an avg. of 100GB. Thanks to Windows 2012 (R2). Windows eats diskspace like cookiemonster

[poulpreben]

Customer feedback: Around 500 VMs, Approx. 100 GB average size.