What is the maximum number of ESXi hosts that a vSphere cluster can contain?

A vSphere cluster can contain a maximum of up to 96 ESXi hosts. This capacity allows for a substantial number of hosts to be interconnected, facilitating resource management and load balancing while maximizing the overall performance and scalability of the virtualized environment.

Clusters are a key aspect of VMware's vSphere, allowing the aggregation of resources from multiple hosts to optimize resource allocation, enhance availability with features like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA), and to improve operational management.

The design behind supporting up to 96 hosts enables organizations to deploy extensive virtual infrastructures that can handle a significant volume of workloads. This is particularly valuable in enterprise settings where workloads can be demanding, and redundancy and fault tolerance are crucial.

Considering the other options, while 48, 64, and 80 hosts may be viable numbers for certain configurations or previous versions of vSphere, the current architecture and capabilities have expanded to support the higher limit of 96 hosts per cluster, ensuring that VMware stays at the forefront of virtualization technology for larger environments.