VC Host CPU - Mhz

[rbmadison]

Can someone help me explain this column? I have a quad processor ESX 3.5 server running 2 virtual machines. If you look at the bar graphs below it indicates the top one is using 96mhz and the other one is useing 36mhz. If I go into either VM and look at processor utilization it is sitting at 4% or lower on both. Where are these 96 and 36 numbers coming from and why are they different if they are both only using 4% in task manager in the VM iteself? We have done no special resource allocation for these VMs. What makes these bars vary so dramatically if the guest OS is exactly the same?

Thanks for the help in advance.

[khughes · Accepted solution]

That shows that your VM's are only using 96MHz of the processor. ESX shares resources so your servers don't have access to a full 1-2 CPU's, but all vm's on that host access the same shared resources. Say you have 2 x 2.0GHz cpu's in your ESX host, the VM's that run on that host have access to 4,000 MHz of clock speed along with the amount of cores it needs etc.

In your case these are very low running server (we have many servers running under 100mhz like DC's) which are only eating up a sliver of CPU resources.