CPUs per guest licencing

[Ghell]

I have a Dell 2950 with two quad core xeons. My ESX 3.5 licence was upgraded to 2 vSphere licences.

When I make a guest, it tells me that I am only licensed for 4 virtual CPUs, even though the drop-down goes up to 8. As far as I can see, the actual licence says that I can have 1 socket per licence and each can have up to 6 cores but I cannot find anything about limiting the maximum number of virtual CPUs on a guest to 4.

Is this a technical issue due to the fact that the physical processors are each quad cores (e.g. a guest can only actually use 1 physical processor) or is it a licensing issue? I know it says it is a licensing issue but I have not found anything to back this up.

This is quite annoying for me as I have 1 very large guest on the machine that uses most of the resources and a few smaller guests that could probably share 1 core between them in terms of the processing power they use (small Linux guests that are mostly idle).

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

Your VMware license allows you create VMs with 4 vCPUs only, so if you really need more than 4 vCPUs you have to upgrade your VMware vSphere license to Enterprise Plus level.

http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/vsphere_purchaseoptions.html

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[AWo]

Except the Enterprise Plus version all vSphere versions only support 4 vCPU's.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

AWo

VCP / vEXPERT 2009

Edited by AWo

[Ghell]

Thanks for the info. To be honest, I didn't think that "4-way Virtual SMP" meant "guests are limited to a maximum of 4 virtual CPUs each". It just isn't immediately obvious to me.

Luckily the software I am running is modular so I can simply run multiple guests and separate out parts of it to dodge that rather expensive bullet.

[AntonVZhbankov]

If your software can be scaled horizontally, and be divided to multiple number of smaller VMs you should do this.

More vCPUs your VM have - more difficult task lays on ESX scheduler. Here you can find detailed description: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2008/06/esx-scheduler-s.html

There is even recommendation - do NOT use vSMP unless you have REAL need.

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru