How many physical CPUs on virtual server (vmware)

Question

I have a Windows server running under VMWare.

CPUs are reported as Dual 2.40 GHz Intel Xeon E7330.

Is this the real number of CPUs? How can I find the real number of CPUs?

Solution 1

From within the Windows VM, you're only seeing the number of vCPUs that are allocated to the VM by the virtual environment administrator. That number can be less than or equal to the number of real cores on the ESX host, but no higher.

If you have access to the VirtualCenter VI Client console, you can see the ESX Host summary page for the number of physical CPU cores on each host.

There's still a bit of fact checking to establish how many cores/sockets you really have, depending on what version you're running and whether your CPUs are multi-core/have HT enabled. The CPUs you've listed are quad-core.

Short answer: You can't tell how many CPUs the host has from within the VM.

Solution 2

7000-series could have two or four physical CPUs. I usually see this config set up with four CPUs.

Solution 3

That would be the number of CPU's presented to the machine via VMWare. You would need to check the VIC to see the exact configuration of the physical server.

Comments

[frankadelic]

Are the specs of the CPUs inside listed inside the VM the same as the host. So, the VM listed Dual 2.40 GHz Intel Xeon E7330 -- does that mean these CPUs are on the host? Or could they be completely different, AMD for example?

[ewwhite]

It means that the host CPU is that speed and model.

[Aashraya Singal]

Typically they will be the same, but there's an ESX feature called CPU Masking which could be in use, and that would misrepresent the CPU ID the a guest. The likelyhood of CPU Masking being set is quite low, as it's used when you have a disparate collection of hosts in an ESX cluster. When it is, the CPU reported to the guest is an older generation than the true CPU model.