How many virtual processors or cores should I assign to my Guest OS?

Posted by reidLinden on Super User See other posts from Super User or by reidLinden
Published on 2011-02-14T14:50:22Z Indexed on 2012/04/12 11:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 310

Filed under:

cpu

|

vmware

|

vmware-workstation

I've just received an upgraded Host machine, and am looking to push some of those advances to my workstations Guest OS(s). In particular, I used to have a single processor, with 2 cores, so my Guest OS only had 1/1.

Now, I've got a single processor with 8 cores, so I'm curious about what would be recommended for my Guest OS now?

1 processor/4 cores?
2 processors/2 cores?
4 processors/1 core?

My instinct says to stick with the number of physical processors (or less), but, is that based on reality? I spent a good while looking for an answer to this, but perhaps my google-karma isn't in my favor today.

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about cpu

Speedstep and Intel x5570?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hi, My new server has 2 x X5570 CPUs. Now here is the output of grep -i hz /proc/cpuinfo model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU … >>> More
VMware ESXi - varying CPU time (CPU reservation)

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hello! I'm running FreeBSD 7.2 under VMware ESXi 3.5. Host has 2 physical CPUs and the BSD box is currently the only running VM. Only one virtual CPU is assigned to the VM. When measuring CPU time of a specific program, I get very different results from time to time. Processor usage is reported… >>> More
How to calculate CPU % based on raw CPU ticks in SNMP

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
According to http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/docs/mibs/ucdavis.html#scalar_notcurrent ssCpuUser, ssCpuSystem, ssCpuIdle, etc are deprecated in favor of the raw variants (ssCpuRawUser, etc). The former values (which don't cover things like nice, wait, kernel, interrupt, etc) returned a percentage… >>> More
disparity between `top`'s given CPU % and process CPU usage total

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I've noticed that there are sometimes (large) differences between the reported total CPU usage and a summation of the per-process CPU utilization given by apps like top and wmtop. As an example: I recently ran a git filter-branch --index-filter on a fairly large repo, with the index-filter command… >>> More
How to read oom-killer syslog messages?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have a Ubuntu 12.04 server which sometimes dies completely - no SSH, no ping, nothing until it is physically rebooted. After the reboot, I see in syslog that the oom-killer killed, well, pretty much everything. There's a lot of detailed memory usage information in them. How do I read these logs… >>> More

Related posts about vmware

VMware sort VMware Go Pro sa solution de virtualisation Cloud pour PME, passerelle vers VMware vSphere

as seen on Developper.com - Search for 'Developper.com'
VMware sort VMware Go Pro Sa solution de virtualisation Cloud pour PME, passerelle vers VMware vSphere VMware vient d'annoncer la sortie de sa solution de virtualisation Cloud pour les PME : VMware Go Pro. VMware Go Pro a pour principal objectif de faciliter les efforts de virtualisation… >>> More
vmware network installation problem

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
After installation from vmware_bunddle it shows network device error during configuration(First run). Log File: 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Log for VMware Workstation pid=5766 version=8.0.2 build=build-591240 option=Release 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: The… >>> More
Run Windows in Ubuntu with VMware Player

as seen on How to geek - Search for 'How to geek'
Are you an enthusiast who loves their Ubuntu Linux experience but still needs to use Windows programs? Here’s how you can get the full Windows experience on Ubuntu with the free VMware Player. Linux has become increasingly consumer friendly, but still, the wide majority of commercial software… >>> More
I'm trying to install VMWare tools on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS and I seem to have a problem with Kernel headers

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I have Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS installed on a VMware machine on Windows 7 host. I seem to have a problem with Kernel headers when trying to install them I did: sudo apt-get install gcc make build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading… >>> More
VMWare player - compiling server modules - Ubuntu 13.10

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
While running Ubuntu 13.04 whenever the Linux kernel had been updated, this used to make vmware player happy: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and lo and behold, the above workaround does not work anymore: Unable… >>> More