Show multiple cores as one proc in VM?

[carrothospital]

So, I have a slight issue with how provisioning processors works and was wondering if there was a way around it.

I have two quad core procs and when I go to to assign processors to a VM, it shows each core as separate. That's all fine and dandy, but I'm setting up a SQL server that only has a 1 proc license. If I give 4 cores to that VM, they all show as different processors, which SQL will not be too happy about.

Is there a way to show 4 cores as a single processor inside the VM? I'd rather not give just one core to SQL.

Thanks!

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

see this link, it may be helpful

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/06/04/per-processor-licenses-for-your-application/

[carrothospital]

Gee, that was fast. Thanks for the link, it's exactly what I need!

[filbo]

Troy Clavell wrote:

see this link, it may be helpful

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/06/04/per-processor-licenses-for-your-application/

Hmmm, I didn't know about that.

I think that it should currently be considered experimental; a decent test of "experimental or not" is "does any part of the UI know about this?"; being able to type its name into a generic "row ID" field doesn't count.

Anyway. I'm going to respond to some of the comments from that link here. Someone said they'd done this on ESX 3.5u2 -- nope. It first appears in 4.0. You can put any string you want into those "Advanced Configuration Parameters" rows, the important question is whether anything pays attention to it.

In fact, this first appears in ESX 4.0 and is effective only on VMs using hardware version 7. So the person who tried it to no effect on ESX 4.0 was probably using a backwards-compatible VM.

Another setting, "cpuid.supportsMulticore", might allow you to use this with HW versions lower than 7. I can see that this is a required setting for coresPerSocket; and that it's turned on by HW 7; and that you can set it directly on lower HW versions. What I don't know without conducting experiments is whether manually overriding it works, or just gets you past one test to fail somewhere else.

The total number of vCPUs in a VM must be an integer multiple of coresPerSocket.

Using coresPerSocket > 1 prevents you from using CPU hotplugging.

I don't know if the coresPerSocket feature has shipped in any Hosted products.

All of these details are subject to change; nothing is official until it's in the UI or formal documentation.

>Bela<