Running Windows Experience Index (WEI) on a Virtual Machine in an ESXi host?

[janpan722]

Has anyone out there ever run WEI of Windows 7 on a VM in an ESXi host? No matter how much I stress the host, or limit the amount of CPU or Memory on the VM, as long as the allocated resources don't change, I always get the same result of WEI! Let say the Windows 7 VM is assigned with 1GB of memory, the result of running WEI with unlimited box checked in the memory and WEI with limited memory of 256MB is exactly the same!! Same thing happen to CPU. The only way I could explain this is that Windows 7 only looks at the amount of memory or the CPU speed, it doesn't really care the underneath memory is real memory, shared memory or swap memory. Am i right about this?

[janpan722]

I think I have figured out the answer.

Apparently, WEI only gives static information of a VM, it doesn't put any dynamic information into the score calculation. So if my ESX host has an Intel Xeon CPU 3.73GHz CPU, I will also get 5.90 CPU score on the VM. If a VM was provisioned with 1GB of memory, it will always get 4.5 on the memory. I doubt that I will get the same result on different hardware hosts, however, with the same underneath hardware and spec of the VM, I will always get the same result.

Sources:

http://www.drivermax.com/driver/vista-rating/index_cpu.php

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Windows-Experience-Index-Understand-and-improve-you...