Of course I had to run some benchmarks to test things out. Single thread/All.

So assuming pcores are used first, using only the amount of pcores seems pretty good (numvcpus = "X" and cpuid.coresPerSocket = "X").

2 sockets and 8 logical which is what vmware uses by default if you select the maximum 16, either gets a massive hit from switching or then we are not using 16 at all, maybe only 8 (numbers would indicate we do use 16 though). Still surprised by the massive hit though, could also be benchmark related of course.

Going for 16 using 2 ecores raises the full score marginally, each ecore=30%*pcore in Passmark, almost no effect in Geekbench.

Going to stay at 16=14+2 then. Not for the marginal increase but it seems to work and if vmware someday would upgrade so that the virtual machine would understand ecores, maybe having 2 ecores in there would make sense.

Now, if someone could prove using only 12 pcores and leaving 2 pcores and 6 ecores for the main machine because of Teams recordings or something, that would be an interesting read.