VMware ESXi 3.5 - 8.0 Hypervisor Size Comparison

VMware's bare-metal hypervisor ESXi is in the market for 15 years now. During that time it has been continuously refined and new features like the Container Runtime in vSphere 7.0 have been added. In vSphere 8.0, a completely new ARM-based architecture has been introduced. In this article, I am going to have a look at how much the hypervisor footprint has been changed from ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 8.0.

• 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
• ESXi 6.5 - 135,39 MB
• ESXi 6.7 - 129,51 MB
• ESXi 7.0 - 149,40 MB
• ESXi 8.0 - 226,62 MB

How is the Hypervisor Size determined?
According to VMware documentation, the footprint of ESXi 5 was 144MB and 150MB in ESXi 6. There are no official statistics for later versions. For this article, 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
• All "esx-" and "vsan-" packages in ESXi 6.0u2 including 6.5 and 6.7
• All "esx-", "vsan-" and "crx/trx" (container runtime) packages in ESXi 7.0 and ESXi 8.0

The size of an ESXi 7.0 ISO Image is 344 MB. What are the other image components?