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wfo
Contributor
Contributor

When will Workstation Support 4 cores in the guest OS?

I've been waiting patiently for VMware Workstation to support 4 cores in the guest OS since the first B3 Intel quads. The 3rd gen quads are about to be released and we will have legitimate Octa-cores in the first quarter of '09. Isn't it about time Vmware stepped up to the plate to provide support for what should now be considered a mainstream processor? How much longer do we have to wait?

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Peter_vm
Immortal
Immortal

I've been waiting patiently for VMware Workstation to support 4 cores in the guest OS since the first B3 Intel quads. The 3rd gen quads are about to be released and we will have legitimate Octa-cores in the first quarter of '09. Isn't it about time Vmware stepped up to the plate to provide support for what should now be considered a mainstream processor? How much longer do we have to wait?

Much longer. Probably even after VMware anounces support for 8 vCPU guests in their ESX line.

It will probably occur at the same time as average desktops reach 8 logical processors.

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wfo
Contributor
Contributor

That's very disappointing. I consider quads mainstream now. Granted those who check e-mail and surf will get by with dual-cores for the next 10 years. For power users, the more processors the better. :smileycool: This may force many to go straight Linux.:-(

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birdie
Expert
Expert

Quads are very far away from being mainstream. Mainstream - it is what SOHO uses - and most applications in use by SOHO cannot utilize more than two cores.

And you'd better ask your question here Smiley Wink

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

I've been waiting patiently for VMware Workstation to support 4 cores in the guest OS since the first B3 Intel quads. The 3rd gen quads are about to be released and we will have legitimate Octa-cores in the first quarter of '09. Isn't it about time Vmware stepped up to the plate to provide support for what should now be considered a mainstream processor? How much longer do we have to wait?

Supporting more than two processors in the hosted architecture is extremely difficult, since we don't have control of the host OS scheduler.

I believe that in the Workstation 6.5 betas you can set numvcpus = 4 in the .vmx file and you will get four CPUs in your guest, but it is unsupported and you are not likely to actually see any performance gain since we spend most of the time blocking VCPU threads for correctness reasons.

If you want to run a 4 CPU guest, you should consider ESXi. I realize that's not a Workstation product,

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