Installation guide

C H A P T E R 2 Creating and Configuring Virtual Machines
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First you must configure the virtual machine to use more than one virtual processor.
Use the management interface. For instructions, see Configuring a Virtual Machine’s
Memory and Virtual Processors on page 120. Then follow the steps appropriate to the
guest operating system below.
Windows Server 2003 Guest Operating Systems
Windows Server 2003 upgrades the HAL automatically. All you need to do is use the
management interface to configure the virtual machine to use more than one virtual
processor. When you power on the virtual machine, the guest operating system
detects the new processor and updates the HAL accordingly.
Windows 2000 Guest Operating Systems
For Windows 2000 guest operating systems, to use more than one virtual processor,
you need to configure the virtual machine to use more than one virtual processor.
Then you need to upgrade the guest operating system’s HAL. Virtual machines
created with one processor in ESX Server 2.1 use the ACPI Uniprocessor HAL. To be
able to use two virtual processors, you need to use the ACPI Multiprocessor HAL. To
change the HAL, you should follow the instructions in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. Go
to support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;237556.
Linux Guest Operating Systems
In order to create a virtual machine with more than one virtual processor, you must
create a new virtual machine with two virtual processors then install the guest
operating system in this new virtual machine.
The Linux distribution must support SMP. Supported Linux guest operating systems
that can be configured with more than one virtual processor include Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 2.1, Red Hat Linux 9.0, SuSE Linux 8.2 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server
(SLES) 8.
Downgrading to One Virtual Processor
VMware ESX Server does not support downgrading a multiprocessor virtual machine
to a uniprocessor virtual machine.