4 Processor Dual Core Xeon appears as 4 processor in Windows 2003

[Vmware_Moron]

Hello,

I have a 4 processor dual core Xenon Esx host. I imported a Windows guest using P2V and everything is working fine.

When I click on "processor" option inside "configuration" tab of my Esx host, I see 4 Processor Sockets, 2 Processor Core per socket, 16 Logical processors, and Hyperthreading enabled. Yet when I go into my Windows guest machine and run "windmsd, or open task manager, I only see 4 processors - please see attached jpg.

Is there something wrong?

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

No - that's exactly as it should be. A VM can have 1 / 2 or 4 virtual CPUs. That's all VMware SMP supports at this time. If the VM doesn't need it, you might consider dropping the CPU count as that will make it easier for ESX to schedule CPU cycles for the VM as ESX will have to always find 4 free logical CPUs on the host to process each CPU cycle of the VM. That's not an issue on a lightly used system, but if the system gets load it can be a problem. And if the P2V was from an older server, perhaps the increase in CPU speed of the ESX host will allow you to drop to 2 vCPUs.

[Vmware_Moron]

Dave,

I appreciate you getting back to me.

My guest CPU utilization is getting hammered. The guest VM that's causig this is a "Windows 2003 Terminal Server" with about 56 users connected. They run mostly Outlook, Great Plains, Internet Explorer, and Saleslogix from their session. I'm already triggering the default alrms (going from green to yellow and vice versa).

My only other VM guest running off of this test Esx host is my Virtual Center Sever. I like to belive my Esx host is beefy enough: It's a HP Proliant ML570 G4 running at 3.20Ghz with 8GB of Ram. The Ram utilization is bleow 30% average, so that is not the problem.

So my next question is this: Is Windows Terminal Servers a poor candidate as a guest VM?

Thanks again for any comments.