We have a Win2008 server 32 bit running as a virtual machine under ESX server. It has 6 CPU cores of 2Gz each and 4GB ram. It's running MS Sql Server 2008 R2 only.

Problem: The server is heavily loaded and responds slowly. From windows taskmanagers point of view, it really looks overloaded, CPU wise. However, our external "cloud manager" says it's only using 2.5GHz worth of CPU-cycles in the cluster. I/O times looks "good".

We have already tried to set the SQL servers number of working threads from 0(auto) to 256, to no effect.

How to tune the VM host, guest or SQL to use all of it's alotted resources? Does it sound possible att all?