When you deploy the vCenter Server Appliance, you can select to deploy an appliance that is suitable for the size of your vSphere environment. The option that you select determine the number of CPUs and the amount of memory that the appliance will have.

The hardware requirements such as number of CPUs and memory depend on the size of your vSphere inventory.

Hardware Requirements for VMware vCenter Server Appliance

!!! remark. the setup of the appliance looks at the number of cores in your CPU.  so for example if you have a 6 core CPU then you have 12 logical cores but you wont be able to choose for a medium environment or larger.

 Resources Platform Services Controller Tiny Environment (up to 10 Hosts, 100 Virtual Machines) Small Environment (up to 100 Hosts, 1,000 Virtual Machines) Medium Environment (up to 400 Hosts, 4,000 Virtual Machines)  Large Environment (up to 1,000 Hosts, 10,000 Virtual Machines)
 Number of CPUs  2 2 4 8 16
 Memory  2 GB RAM  8 GB RAM  16 GB RAM  24 GB RAM  32 GB RAM

Important

For vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded Platform Services Controller, you must add the hardware requirements for Platform Services Controller to the hardware requirements for vCenter Server Appliance depending on the size of your environment.