Unable to power on a VM after upgrading to 12vCPU from 8 due to vsphere standard licensing limit of 8vCPU per VM for ESXi 5.1. Will that change if I upgrade to ESXi 5.5?
According to this article, you should be able to configure up to 64 vCPUs on 5.5 (provided your physical host has enough hardware threads):
VMware KB: Licensing for VMware vSphere 5.5
You can configure up to the maximum number of vCPUs per virtual machine as specified in the vSphere 5.5 Configuration Maximums Guide http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r55/vsphere-55-configuration-maximums.pdf.
Se this document
https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf
