I just upgraded to esxi 4.0, previously the machine was running linux with vmware server 1.0.

I have

Processor Sockets:2

Processor Cores per Socket:1

Logical Processors:4

Hyperthreading: Enabled.

My Default Resource Allocation is:

Total Capacity: 4200 MHz

Reserved Capacity: 0 MHz

Available Capacity: 4200

The "System Resource Allocation" shows

System Resource Reservation : 300 MHz.

The System Resource Pools for Host show:

CPU Reservation: 6000 MHz

Limit: 6000 MHz

1.)How does it determine the difference between the "System Resource Pool" for the Host and "System Resource Allocation" for vm's?

The simple view of "System Resource Allocation" shows it has reserved 300 MHz.

2.) I have a chart that shows the cpu usage has exceeded the total cpu utilization on the system, up to 13320 MHz, how is this possible?

Addin in all the physical cores and hyperthread it should add up to 12 Ghz.

3.) I attempted to determine if it is a percentage of the total, on another machine I have these numbers:

Machine 1:

4200/ 6000 = .7

Machine 2:

37145/39888 = .93

(Resource Allocation) / System Resource Allocation = % available for vm use.

I am amazed at the performace improvement of esxi 4.

We migrated 2 vmware 1.0 servers each running 6 virtual machines to one esxi server running 4 virtual machines. We get equal performance with the 1/2 the hardware and 1/3 the number of virtual machines.