Win7 64x Host running VM's - only half CPU being used

[Jatz]

Hi all.

This is probably a but premature and VM does not officially support Win7 but I was wondering if anyone could help with this:

I'm running several VM's (all WinXP) on a Win7 Ultimate 64x host. when I run up a VM and put a 100% load on the VM I see my host CPU go to 50% max. This would suggest that the VM is running only on one core of my duo core processor. If I change the VM to use 2 processors I get the same result on the host but the VM also only get to 50% CPU usage.

Any idea why this would happen?

The same images running on a Vista host worked fine and ran much faster.

Cheers,

Jacek

[dmitrygr]

#1 is expected: 1 vcpu uses one physical cpu

#2 is your error. you only loaded one guest cpu. whatever you use to load it up, is single threaded. run two copies in the guest

[Jatz]

Thanks for your thoughts. I went back and had a look at my CPU settings. In the end I set it up to use 2 CPU's (as I've done before) but this time I changed the Execution Mode to use Intel-VT instead of Automatic. This seems to have done the job. Everything now runs as fast if not faster then under a Vista host.

So my next question is: why would the auto setting not pick the Intel-VT option? Is fixing the exectution mode bad?

Cheers,

Jacek

[dmitrygr]

Auto will generally pick VT, so i think it was just the error in the app used to load the guest.

if you want, i can check the log for you. Open vmware.log and look for line like "MONITOR MODE: allowed modes" and post the few lines before/after it

[Jatz]

I've attached two log files, one is of the guest setup to use a single CPU, the other with two CPU's. I set the execution mode to Automatic on both.

As for your reference to the "app used to load the guest" I assume you mean that the application I'm running on the guest may not be using both CPU's. Is that what you are refering to? I would have thought that VMware and the guest OS (WinXP) should be able to use both CPU's. While the guest is booting, the host CPU usage maxes out at just over 50% then drops off when the guest fully loads. Then when I run any application on the guest I can see the host CPU max out at just over 50%. This is the strange thing.

I did not notice this effect if I set the execution mode to Intel-VT.

Cheers,

Jac