Alistar
Expert
Expert

Hi there,

the vCPUs are always co-scheduled on a physical CPU (so for 4 vCPUs you need to have 4 physical cores ready to process the instruction at the same time) - the total number of vCPUs relies on how much resources you want to overcommit on the ESXi host (if scaled well, that is). You can even have as much as 24+ vCPUs in total - it all depends on what kind of workload you plan on running.

Just make sure you avoid the 6vCPU (or any number of CPUs that you have on a single socket) boundary because of NUMA node traversing which can affect your memory access times & CPU access adversely.

Stop by my blog if you'd like :slightly_smiling_face: I dabble in vSphere troubleshooting, PowerCLI scripting and NetApp storage - and I share my journeys at http://vmxp.wordpress.com/