10.3. Allocating Virtual Machine CPU Capacity

When you create a new virtual machine using the vSphere Client, the only question you are asked related to the CPU is, "Number of virtual processors?" This CPU setting effectively lets the guest operating system utilize one, two, four, or eight virtual CPUs on the host system, depending upon the guest operating system and the vSphere license.

When the VMware engineers designed the virtualization platform, they started with a real system board and modeled the virtual machine after it—in this case, it was based on the Intel 440BX chipset. The PCI bus was something the virtual machine could emulate and could be mapped to input/output devices through a standard interface, but how could a virtual machine ...

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