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VMware ESXi 3.5 - 6.0 Hypervisor Size Comparison

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

vmware-hypervisor-size-history

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:

ESXiSize
4.057,80 MB
4.0 U158,82 MB
4.0 U259,11 MB
4.0 U359,72 MB
4.0 U459,97 MB
4.0 LATEST59,99 MB
4.185,45 MB
4.1 U185,89 MB
4.1 U285,25 MB
4.1 U385,27 MB
4.1 LATEST85,19 MB
5.0133,64 MB
5.0 U1132,32 MB
5.0 U2132,27 MB
5.0 U3132,56 MB
5.0 LATEST132,75 MB
5.1124,60 MB
5.1 U1124,88 MB
5.1 U2125,67 MB
5.1 U3125,85 MB
5.1 LATEST125,85 MB
5.5151,52 MB
5.5 U1152,24 MB
5.5 U2151,71 MB
5.5 LATEST151,98 MB
6.0154,90 MB

The size of an ESXi 6.0 ISO Image is 344 MB. What are the other components on that image?

PackageSize
Hypervisor155 MB (45%)
Drivers11 MB (3%)
VMware Tools Images179 MB (52%)

vsphere-esxi-6-0-image-components

 

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5 thoughts on “VMware ESXi 3.5 - 6.0 Hypervisor Size Comparison”

  1. 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:

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