VMware vSphere tags limit – is it known ?

VMware vSphere tags limit – is it known ?

Recently I received quite interesting question – what is the supported maximum quantity  for tags in vCenter 6.0U2 ?

Malignant author of the question is a good friend of mine and VMware administrator in one person. He ssked about tags limit because he want to use them to provide more information about each of its production VM’s – roughly speaking need to create about 20000 tags.

I thought ok., give me couple seconds to verify this,  and looked fast in vmware configuration maxims …. couple minuntes later it was clear that this is not a easy question 😉

Furthermore after some additional research (no clear statement in official documentation)  we decide to perform tests in lab environment !

We used simple powercli script to create 20000 tags in test vcenter appliance (6.0U2) , below our script:

for($i=1
$i -le 20000
$i++){
New-Tag -Name $i -Description $i -Category test
}

Script worked like a charm without any issue – so far so good :), but when we tried to assign one tag to first vm we encounter web client error 1009  – very strange!

We decided to perform additional test and find out that limit is below 10000.  At this stage we decide to clear this issue with Vmware support and after some time received wery interesting feedback:

  1. NGC has upper bound of retrieve 10000 objects max.
  2. If the tags are less than 10000 then data service timeouts after 120 seconds(default dataservice timeout is 120 seconds).
  3. Decreasing the count to 9994 tags and increasing dataservice timeout, shows up all the tags(Assign) now.

As a temporary workaround for now.
————————————-
1. Have total created tags less than 10000.
2. Increase data service timeout to 600 seconds(10 min).

VMware GSS stands that engineering working now to remove tag limit boundary in next releases vSphere 6.x.

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3 thoughts on “VMware vSphere tags limit – is it known ?

  1. I have a similar issue, that VMWARE support in unable to solve

    I have 1800 VM and 5 tags per VM, so less than 10k tags

    With a script, i add tags to those VM, and after about 40 tag-assignment, the first vm’s tag suddendly disappeared. I can only have about 40 tags in the same time. When a new assignement is done, an old one left.

    It used to work in the past, and i don’t know what change can have been done…

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