Questions About Cores and Sockets

[peter79]

In vSphere 4 if a VM needed more CPU resources you simply added an additional CPU to the VM.  However in vSPhere 5 you have option of adding extra cores or sockets.

I have a few general questions about this.

What are implications of adding a extra core over a socket and vica versa?

Would there any situations where you would pick one over the other (for example I've seen articales about installing ESXi5 in a VM mention configuring the VM with 2 virtual sockets instead of 2 virtual cores)?

Regards.

[kooltechies]

Look the discussion here http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335057 . The opinions so far are that there is no visible performance enhancements only to satisfy certain licensing requirements.

[rickardnobel · Accepted solution]

Yes, there is really no difference, just that some guest operating system or application might have restrictions on sockets, but not on cores.