ESXi 4 with AMD phenom x3 720 and M3A78-EM motherboard (minor problem)

[ps3guy]

Hello,

I am fairly new to the vmware world. I have successfully used this whitebox combo for around 6 months. In order to have a succesful install, I had to upgrade my bios to ver 2003 and use intel nic pcie cards. After a successful install, I looked inside the host and it recognized the CPU X3 720 with all 3 cpu cores. It also allowed me to assign all 3 cores to a windows 7 media box I setup as an image on the host. The question and problem I have is: In the new windows 7 x64 image, it doesn't show 3 cores, it only shows 2 cores. The detail information inside Windows 7 say's it is an AMD phenom X3 2.81Gz processor with 2 processors, not 3. In the task manager, the cpu usage window only displays 2 windows instead of 3.

Two processors are plenty for what this image is going to be doing but it would be nice to use all 3 processors, if possible.

No matter what I try, I cannot get windows 7 to recognize all 3 cores. Even after I try all the tricks online, including re-installing, there isn't even a hint of success.

I have concluded that the vmware bios used for images, doesn't properly recognize the CPU with 3 cores. Am I correct on my assumption?

Thanks

[a_p_]

Each core of your physical CPU is presented to the VM as a single vCPU.

The number of virtual vCPU's depends on the OS you install. VMware allows as many vCPU's per VM as the OS vendor supports. (That's one of the reasons, why you have to select an OS when creating a VM)

If you open "Edit settings" for your VM you will see that only 2 vCPU's are selectable for Windows 7.

In VMware Workstation 7 there's already a setting cores per CPU which allows to add present multi core vCPUs to the guest OS. In ESX(i) this feature is not officially included (yet?).

André

[ps3guy]

Thanks for the reply. When I had created a Windows 7 image, I picked the windows 7 x64 bit platform. If I go and edit the image, it allows for me to choose all 3 cores, so obviously the image platform I picked allows for full use of the tri-core cpu. It looks like this version of ESX recognizes the phenom X3 with no issues in the host. I added some more print screen shots below.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Seems I was wrong with the number of vCPU you can assign to a Windows 7 VM.

However, the vCPU's are presented as CPU sockets to the VM and Windows 7 only supports 2 physical CPU's (Starter and Home only 1). So this looks like Windows ignores the third CPU. See feature comparison at Compare Windows 7 Features. Search for "Physical Processor Support"

If you have a licensed version of ESX(i) you could try the currently unsupported feature to assign the 3 vCPU's as one Multi-Core-CPU.

see Per processor licenses for your application

André

[ps3guy]

Thank you, your a genious. I tried your second suggestion and it worked! I see all 3 cores in windows 7 OS. All 3 show up in the device manager and under the CPU performance monitor.