ESXi resource management - How to assign maximum CPU power to a VM?

[jonmalco9]

We have a Quad-Core server running ESXi 4.

I want to assign full CPU power (as much as possible) to a Vista32 VM.

Even though, i choose "Unlimited" CPU usage and I assigned 4 cores to

the VM, it maxes out at about 4.6GHz out of 9.6GHz possible.

It is interesting that the Vista Task Manager shows only two CPU

graphs. There are four CPU cores listed in the Windows Device

manager...

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your discussion has been moved to the Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

Which Vista edition are you using? Part of the issue likely is that Vista is seeing 4 individual CPU and I think 32 bit may be limit to 2 CPUs. In the beta there was an option to present multi core CPUs to a VM instead of individual CPUs. Give this a try.

Power off the VM

Right click on the VM and select "Edit Settings..."

Select the "Options" tab

Click on "General" (in the "Advanced" options section)

Click "Configuration Parameters..." (in the pane on the right)

Click "Add Row"

Enter "cpuid.coresPerSocket" in the "Name" column

Enter a value (try 2, 4, or 😎 in the "Value" column

Click "OK"

Power on the VM

[helloyello]

Hi Dave,

as of your suggestion, i set cpuid.coresPerSocket to 4.

Now, the Vista VM has all four cores available and is able to utilize them fully!

Thanks!

[Jae_Ellers]

Is this only experimental and therefore unsupported at this point?

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[Troy_Clavell]

Duncan blogged about this, but I think the verdict is still out on whether or not it's supported, but it does work.