liam_impero

Keeping Faith is keeping me entertained at the moment!

Hi CHiLL, I’m Liam, Infrastructure and Systems Manager at Impero Software. I'm answering this in capacity as part of the Edugeek community. In short, there is no difference between vCPU cores and sockets. The idea was included in VMWare as a way to get around limitations of the guest OS. For example in Windows Server 2008 (yes we have to go back that far!), there was a limitation of four PHYSICAL CPUs. In VMWare, no matter how many sockets you assign this server (for example 8), it will not recognise more than 4 of the vCPUs assigned to it. So in comes the theory of logical cores per socket (ie, one physical CPU acting as many CPUs). We can assign the same 2008 server a single socket with 8 cores, it’ll happily use all 8 of the vCPUs assigned to it. This limitation has all but disappeared in more modern OS’s (from memory Server 2016 supports 512 CPUs!). CPU is always heavily over provisioned on the Hypervisors, so you can really assign as much as you like to the guest servers . I find a single socket with 4 cores works happily for most use cases. That being said, look up the minimum specs for each application/server role you’re running to be sure they are resourced appropriately. Many thanks, Liam