Web client and vCenter's SQL

[crgnjul]

I'm caught in a catch 22 and need some advise.

The SQL server that vCenter uses is hardware version 10 and hardware settings must be changed via the web client.  We tried to hot-add 4 CPUs to take the server to 8 but then remembered that the OS is Standard and will only accept 4 CPUs.  The web client will not let me do a hot remove to drop it back to 4. So I figure I need to shut the VM down and then change the CPUs back to 4.

The problem is that when I shut down vCenters's SQL server I can't do a lot of things inside the web client - such as even see the hardware settings of the SQL box in order to make changes.  Of course if it was not Hardware version 10 I would just connect to the Host with the Windows Client and make the change.  That of course is not an option here.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

My only thoughts are:

1. upgrade the OS to Datacenter (which we are licensed for) and let it use 8 CPUs

2. Shut down the VM and use the stand alone converter to do a V2V and select a lower hardware version that the host can edit and then make the changes with the Windows client connected to the host.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Some of the options are (with the VM powered off):

• use VMware Workstation 10 and connect to the ESXi host which currently hosts the SQL-Server, and modify its settings.
• manually edit the VM's .vmx file and either reduce the number of vCPUs by setting numvcpus = "4", or add cpuid.coresPerSocket = "2" which should present the 8 CPUs as 4 dual core CPUs to the guest OS. Remember that manually editing the .vmx file requires reloading it, see VMware KB: Reloading a vmx file without removing the virtual machine from inventory

André

[crgnjul]

Thank you.  I have no idea why I didn't think about editing the VMX file directly.  That's why I posted on here