I recently saw a question asking about the character limit for the various vSphere Inventory Objects like a Datacenter or Virtual Machine as an example. I was not aware of anything formally documented, but I did come across this 2018 blog post by fellow colleague Todd Simmons, who did some testing with vSphere 6.7 and shared his initial results.
I was curious myself on whether these limits have changed but I also noticed there were many other vSphere Objects that were not tested. I figured this would be an interesting exercise to re-evaluate against the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release and using some PowerShell code like the following to help:
$str = "w" * 80
Below are my findings which have been verified using the vSphere UI and I have also expanded the object list to cover more recent solutions such as vSphere with Tanzu.
| Object | Limit |
|---|---|
| Cluster | 80 |
| Content Library Item | 80 |
| Content Library | 80 |
| Custom Attribute | 80 |
| Datacenter | 80 |
| Datastore Cluster | 80 |
| Datastore | 80 |
| Distributed Virtual Portgroup | 80 |
| Distributed Virtual Switch | 80 |
| Folder | 80 |
| Guest Customization Spec | 255 |
| Host Profile | 80 |
| Resource Pool | 80 |
| Role | > 30K |
| SSO Group | (400) 450 (can't delete) |
| SSO Username | (400) 450 (can't delete) |
| Standard Virtual Portgroup | 82 |
| Storage Policy Component | 80 |
| TKG Guest Cluster | 41 |
| Tag Category | 80 |
| Tag | 80 |
| VM Storage Policy | 80 |
| VM Template | 80 |
| VM | 80 |
| Virtual App | 80 |
| Virtual Standard Switch | 31 |
| vSphere Namespace | 63 |
That is nice to know, but regarding limits, we have a problem with ESXi hosts: no more than 280 are allowed in one folder! But we have 400. So we need to build a needles folder structure. Are there any changes in the near future?
Many thanks for this article - very interesting.
Did you find any issues where the ESXi host limit is shorter than the vCenter limit?
For example, if you connect to an ESXi host you can't create a Datastore name with more than 30 characters. If you create one of 50 chars in vCenter is that likely to cause issues when working with the host directly?
Thanks
Is there a way to change these limits. We have an application that keeps creating file name larger than 150 characters. It would be really helpful if we can somehow change the limit from 80 to 200. Any help would be really appreciated