Managing Virtual Machine CPU Utilization
When creating a VM using the vSphere Web Client, you must configure two CPU-related fields. First, select how many virtual CPUs you want to allocate to the VM, and then assign the number of cores to those CPUs (see Figure 11.7). These CPU settings allow the VM's guest OS to use between 1 and 128 virtual CPUs from the ESXi host, depending on the guest OS and the vSphere edition license.
FIGURE 11.7 Both the number of sockets and number of cores per socket can be configured for VMs.
When VMware's engineers designed the hypervisor platform, they began with a real system board and used it to model the VM—in this case, it was based on the Intel 440BX chipset. The VM could emulate the PCI bus, which could be mapped to I/O devices through a standard interface, but how could a VM emulate a CPU?
The answer was “no emulation.”
Think about a virtual system board that has a CPU socket “hole” where the CPU is...
