At the moment this is the only VM running on that ESX host, would think shares would not come into play. I am not using reservations but have defined resource limit of unlimited.

%RDY counters are very low to none

no ballooning

Thought about turning hyperthreading off but in the end we would like to get the most out of this ESX servers Would also mean that we would need to turn it off on all hosts in the cluster in the event that the VM was migrated (although may be a good exercise for a data point). Is there a way that I can tell how much time a vCPU is actually running as a hyperthread? Might be worth a test just to verify. Weird thing is it seems like VM is not leveraging the CPU weather logical or physical at this point beyond 50%. In addition it is basically exactly 50%.

Not sure what CPU affinity settings to make. I would hope that the scheduler is trying to use all cores accross mutliple sockets (there are only two sockets).

Yea I hate going with the SMP VM's, it adds complexity and reduces my consolidation ratios..