The first public release of VMwares bare-metal hypervisor ESXi was about 7 years ago. During that time we had lots of new features, including the latest outstanding introduction in vSphere 6.0 - Virtual Volumes. This post takes a look at how the hypervisor footprint has changed since ESXi 3.5.
- ESXi 3.5 - 46,01 MB
- ESXi 4.0 - 59,99 MB
- ESXi 4.1 - 85,19 MB
- ESXi 5.0 - 132,75 MB
- ESXi 5.1 - 125,85 MB
- ESXi 5.5 - 151,98 MB
- ESXi 6.0 - 154,90 MB
How did I determine the Hypervisor Size?
According to VMware documentation the footprint of ESXi 5 was 144MB and 150MB in ESXi 6. I could not reconstruct that completely so I compared the following packages:
- The "image" package in ESXi 3.5
- The "firmware" package in ESXi 4.x
- The "esx-base" vib package in ESXi 5.x and 6.x
Within a major release, the size does not change much. This is a full table since vSphere 4.0:
ESXi | Size |
4.0 | 57,80 MB |
4.0 U1 | 58,82 MB |
4.0 U2 | 59,11 MB |
4.0 U3 | 59,72 MB |
4.0 U4 | 59,97 MB |
4.0 LATEST | 59,99 MB |
4.1 | 85,45 MB |
4.1 U1 | 85,89 MB |
4.1 U2 | 85,25 MB |
4.1 U3 | 85,27 MB |
4.1 LATEST | 85,19 MB |
5.0 | 133,64 MB |
5.0 U1 | 132,32 MB |
5.0 U2 | 132,27 MB |
5.0 U3 | 132,56 MB |
5.0 LATEST | 132,75 MB |
5.1 | 124,60 MB |
5.1 U1 | 124,88 MB |
5.1 U2 | 125,67 MB |
5.1 U3 | 125,85 MB |
5.1 LATEST | 125,85 MB |
5.5 | 151,52 MB |
5.5 U1 | 152,24 MB |
5.5 U2 | 151,71 MB |
5.5 LATEST | 151,98 MB |
6.0 | 154,90 MB |
The size of an ESXi 6.0 ISO Image is 344 MB. What are the other components on that image?
Package | Size |
Hypervisor | 155 MB (45%) |
Drivers | 11 MB (3%) |
VMware Tools Images | 179 MB (52%) |
Nice work! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing sir!!
Great job! Do you think you can post some information about esxi folder structure in the future ? I can't finde this information anywhere :sad:
What exactly are you intrested in? It's a very common unix structure.
nice article.