ESXi

We are in the process of migrating physical machines to VMware. I just installed two new servers and found out they were not hyperthreaded so I am not getting the number of virtual CPUs I need for my environment. Will ESXi recognize the new CPUs and vCPU count if I upgrade the CPUs on the machines (of coarse I will stay with the same Intel product family and architecture) or will I need to reinstall ESXi 5.0 once the new CPUs are in the system?

I know I could vMotion my guests to another machine, but that is part of the problem. I do not have enough CPUs on another machine to support the additional guests until I do this upgrade.

Thanks for your feedback.

You should be able to upgrade CPUs without issue -

You can proceed with installation if the processor is 64 bit.

can you see the newly added cpu in BIOS

Thank you for your input. I put the server in maintenance mode then shut it down. I then upgarde the CPU units in the machine and verified they reported correctly in BIOS. When VMware started up it reported the correct CPU information as well. I then took the system out of maintenance mode and migrated my guest back onto it.

VMware is some really cool stuff!