vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses & 8-way SMP

[germoles]

Hi all,

this post is to understand in some more details the 8-way SMP feature added by purchase of the vSphere Enterprise Plus licences.

We have just bought a new vSphere farm with Enterprise licences (hosts are 2-sockets, 4-cores CPUs based), and are upgrading another existing farm from ESX 3.5 to vSphere (hosts are 4-sockets, 4-cores CPUs based).

We know that under the Enterprise licensing schema we will be able to assign our VMs a max of 4 vCPUs each (and to manage up to 6 cores per physical processor).

Should we upgrade the licensing to Enterprise Plus, what would be the max vCPU number we may assign to a VM in each of our farms? Would it still be 4 (since our CPUs are all 4-cores anyway), or 8 (for both the 'old' farm based on 4 4-cores hosts and for the new farm based on 2 4-cores hosts)?

In fact it's not clear to me whether the vCPU max number is still tied to the cores number of a physical CPU (i.e.: max vCPU <= cores/physical CPU AND max vCPU <= 😎 or not.

As an example, should I have a vSphere host running under Enterprise Plus license and ewuipped with 2 6-cores CPUs, how many vCPU may I assign to a VM as a maximum? 6 or 8?

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regads,

Salvatore

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

Enterprise Plus allows you to assign 8 vCPUs, Enterprise and lower - 4.

It does not matter how many cores are on each physical CPU. The only requirement - total number of cores should be more or equal to number of vCPUs you wnat to give one VM. So 2 quads allows you to create 8 vCPU VM.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[germoles]

Hi Anton,

thank you very much for your reply.

Best regards,

Salvatore