New VMware Cloud on AWS host size: i4i.metal

There’s a new host in town! Called i4i.metal.. What can it be used for? What does it cost? Here’s all the answers.

The shiny new i4i.metal host features 64 cores, 1TB of memory (1024 GiB) and ~20.46 TiB of usable blazing fast NVMe storage capacity. That’s a lot of power in a single host.

It’s kind of double what the good old i3.metal host has. It “only” has 36 cores, 512GiB of memory and ~10.37TiB of usable NVMe storage capacity. Thank you VMware’s page.

This means that as you can see below, there’s a new host in the selection screen when creating a SDDC:

Note that like the i3.metal, and unlike the i3en.metal, you can use this host for a single-node test SDDC (note that these expire after 30 days).

What can this i4i.metal host be used for? Well think of anything at large scale. Large scale VDI deployments, memory intensive applications and bluntly put, anything that requires ridiculously large virtual machines or has to be on the same physical host.

In case you wonder, here’s a vCenter view:

As you can imagine it’s also more cost-effective to have three i4i.metal hosts than six i3.metal hosts if you need a lot of compute, memory and/or storage. Note that you can also mount remote datastores now, a blog post about that will be made later.

As always thanks for reading and feedback is welcome!