Seeking Information on Processor and Core Values in Hardware Tab for Virtual Machines

[bruce_giles]

Hi Everyone, we are having some very good conversations in our team over the values we see under the Hardware Tab for Processors, Cores and Threads for Virtual Machines. As we all know, when it comes to this topic in general when talking about Processors ,  Cores, etc in the Virtual space it becomes very complicated, since interpretation plays a huge part.

We are struggling to understand how the Flexera FNMS Console, specifically the Hardware Tab for Virtual Machines is calculating the number of Processors and Cores for the VM's. When looking at the values for Processors and Cores we can not identify the logic behind it. For example, does it simply use the number Cores to populate the number of Processors .. in some cases this looks to be the approach 8 Processors 8 Cores, however, we will then find an assigned VM on the same Host that indicates 1 Processor 4 Cores and another that indicates 2 Processor 10 Cores. 

We understand the theory behind assigning VM's in terms of Processors and Cores but in the above example the Host only has 2 Physical CPU /  Processors  with a total of 28 Cores.

Has anyone figured out the logic behind the numbers we see ... we can appreciate that it could differ for different OS's installed on the VM but our example is Windows.

Thanks in advance, I know this is a messy area but thought we would throw it out there for some feedback ..

Thx

Bruce

[JeffVoss · Accepted solution]

If you are running VMware, find someone with VMware PowerCLI module installed in PowerShell. They should have access to VirtualCenter. have them run this command and compare to FNMS: Get-Inventory | Where-Object {$_.ExtensionData.ToString() -eq 'VMware.Vim.VirtualMachine'} | Format-Table -AutoSize Id, Name, PowerState, NumCPU, CoresPerSocket My inventory matches these numbers. VMware allows you to set every VM's number of CPU's and CoresPerSocket to be set at the VM level so there is no one size fits all. *Note the current PowerCLI is not something you can find with FNMS since it doesn't contain installer evidence and FNMS does not currently find the inventory for PowerShell modules.

[JeffVoss · Accepted solution]

If you are running VMware, find someone with VMware PowerCLI module installed in PowerShell. They should have access to VirtualCenter. have them run this command and compare to FNMS: Get-Inventory | Where-Object {$_.ExtensionData.ToString() -eq 'VMware.Vim.VirtualMachine'} | Format-Table -AutoSize Id, Name, PowerState, NumCPU, CoresPerSocket My inventory matches these numbers. VMware allows you to set every VM's number of CPU's and CoresPerSocket to be set at the VM level so there is no one size fits all. *Note the current PowerCLI is not something you can find with FNMS since it doesn't contain installer evidence and FNMS does not currently find the inventory for PowerShell modules.

[bruce_giles]

Thanks jvoss_fnni .. really appreciate the suggestion, as you indicated, one really needs to understand how their specific VM Software operates. We use VMWare as one of our environments so we may be able to give this a try. We googled our way to see a you tube video on how to assign VM's using VMWare which is helping us. Again, thanks for your suggestion.

Bruce

[bruce_giles · Accepted solution]

Hi Everyone, I spent a bit of time today looking at the actual ndi files and the details available on the Windows VM Server and it looks like the agent simply uses the details available via the windows api evidence of msinfo32. The content of the ndi file for the processors and cores represents exactly what the Windows VM Server indicates when running the msinfo32 utility.

Just an observation at this point but I feel its pretty safe to assume this is correct. As alluded to by jvoss_fnni, one can configure the VM's in many ways. We found by understanding how the gui works in VMware helped us a lot to understand the big picture. Here is a link I found which was very helpful in explaining how VMWare assigns the virtual components of Cores and Processors.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/576209