AVX2 on a Virtual Machine

[BrianJa]

I hope I am posting this to the correct place...

I have a system that has a pair of hosts. Both of the hosts are running Intel Xeon E5=2687W v3 processors which lists of having AVX2 instruction set.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/81909/intel-xeon-processor-e5-2687w-v3-25m-cach...

I recently upgraded the software on a Windows Server 2016 virtual machine that is running on one of the hosts and an error when running the software points to the VM not having the AVX2 instruction set. A colleague wrote a python script to list CPU features and we ran it on the Windows Server 2016 VM and it, in fact, doesn't list the VM has having the AVX2 instruction set. 

Does anyone have an idea of how this could happen? The system is running the outdated VMWare ESXi 5.5, could that be the limitation? Is there anything I am missing here?

Thanks,
Brian

[bluefirestorm]

For the instructions/instruction set that were introduced in Haswell CPUs such as AVX2, BMI1, BMI2 (these are also False in the screenshot), INVPCID to be available in the VM, the VM needs to have virtual hardware version 11 or later. ESXi 5.5 supports only virtual hardware version 10.

[vbondzio]

What bluefirestorm said. I actually covered a similar example in the perf. best practices in 2017, I wasn't at my most eloquent and the audio is cutting off intermittently but I hope it is still useful: https://youtu.be/e9GWK8Pn8ec?t=2587