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.
| 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