maximum number of cores on esxi dell r710 with Xeon E5520 HT

[LucasAlbers]

I am planning to purchase a dell r710.

This system will have 2 quad core physical system and the HT technology.

Intel® Xeon® E5520, 2.26Ghz, 8M Cache, 5.86 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT

It will have 8 cores with two hyperthreads per core.

The free esxi version is limited to 6 cores per socket.

Does a hyperthread count as physical core for this licensing limit?

According to this discussion it appears that a HT is treated per licensing the same as esx 3 and esx2, that is HT does not count against the 6 core license limit.

Is this true?

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

That is my understanding as well. HT is not considered as a part of licensing as you can always disable it. You can not necessarily disable a Core.

Best regards,

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[Formatter]

I have T610 and have learned thet this applies only to actual cores not HT cores. so the E5520 only has 4 actual cores.

[mvoss18]

Hyperthread does not count as a physical core and will not affect your licensing. However, it does count as an extra logical processor and there is a limit of 64 logical processers on a vSphere host. So in this case you should see 16 logical processers with hyperthreading enabled.

[frryd]

Hello,

One thing grabbed my attention. (The free esxi version is limited to 6 cores per socket.)

From my understanding the free license only support one physical cpu with a maximum of 6 cores. So if you buy a server with 2 quad then only one of the cpu will be used?

Exact line from one of our test servers: ESXi 4 Single Server Licensed for 1 physical CPUs (1-6 cores per CPU)

[palm101]

On a DL380 G6 it shows licensed for 2 physical CPU

[Formatter]

My understandin is that if you only have one physicle CPU in the machine it will only show that it is licensed for one cpu however if you put the second one in it will then allow it and show license for 2 CPU.