Difference between CPU, Processor, and Cores?

[Morketh]

Do these all mean the same thing in VSphere? If I click on a cluster in Vsphere web client it shows me "Total processors: 24"

When I click on a VM under that cluster it and look at the Summary tab and then look under VM Hardware it shows 1 CPU for the CPU of that VM.

When I look at each VM under that cluster and look at the amount of CPUs per VM and add them up I get 46 CPUs allocated to all of these VMs in this cluster, but it shows there are 24 total processors.

Is that not the same thing?

When someone asks me how many cores on that VM all I've done is go to the VM in Vsphere and look at the number of CPUs it shows under summary > VM Hardware.

I would have assumed that processors and CPU and Cores were the same thing here?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community,

processors/sockets is used for the physical processors in the host. Each of these processors have a number of cores, and likely supports Hyper-Threading.

In this case a host with 2 x 10 core processors, and Hyper-Threading enabled will shows up with 40 logical CPUs.

The number of vCPUs (each virtual core counts) that you present to VMs can be higher than this. How much you can overcommit, depends on the workload of the individual VMs. The CPU scheduler on the ESXi host does a pretty good job in managing resources.

André