6.0

3 Select Check and upgrade Tools during power cycling in the Advanced pane.
4 Click OK to save your changes and close the dialog box.
The next time the virtual machine is powered on, it checks the ESX/ESXi host for a newer version of
VMware Tools. If one is available, it is installed and the guest operating system is restarted (if required).
Virtual CPU Configuration
You can add, change, or configure CPU resources to improve virtual machine performance. You can set
most of the CPU parameters when you create virtual machines or after the guest operating system is
installed. Some actions require that you power off the virtual machine before you change the settings.
VMware uses the following terminology. Understanding these terms can help you plan your CPU resource
allocation strategy.
CPU
The CPU or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the
instructions of a computer program and is the primary element carrying out
the computer's functions. CPUs contain cores.
CPU Socket
A physical connector on a computer motherboard that accepts a single
physical CPU. Many motherboards can have multiple sockets that can in
turn accept multicore processors (CPUs). The vSphere Web Client computes
the total number of virtual sockets from the number of cores and the cores
per socket that you select.
Core
Comprises a unit containing an L1 cache and functional units needed to run
programs. Cores can independently run programs or threads. One or more
cores can exist on a single CPU.
Corelet
An AMD processor corelet is architecturally equivalent to a logical processor.
Certain future AMD processors will comprise a number of compute units,
where each compute unit has a number of corelets. Unlike a traditional
processor core, a corelet lacks a complete set of private, dedicated execution
resources and shares some execution resources with other corelets such as an
L1 instruction cache or a floating-point execution unit. AMD refers to
corelets as cores, but because these are unlike traditional cores, VMware uses
the nomenclature of corelets to make resource sharing more apparent.
Thread
Some cores can run independent streams of instructions simultaneously. In
existing implementations, cores can run one or two software threads at one
time by multiplexing the functional units of the core between the software
threads, as necessary. Such cores are called dual or multithreaded.
Resource sharing
Shares specify the relative priority or importance of a virtual machine or
resource pool. If a virtual machine has twice as many shares of a resource as
another virtual machine, it is entitled to consume twice as much of that
resource when these two virtual machines are competing for resources.
Resource allocation
You can change CPU resource allocation settings, such as shares, reservation,
and limit, when available resource capacity does not meet demands. For
example, if at year end, the workload on accounting increases, you can
increase the accounting resource pool reserve.
vSphere Virtual
Symmetric
Multiprocessing (Virtual
SMP)
Feature that enables a single virtual machine to have multiple processors.
Chapter 15 Configuring Virtual Machines in the vSphere Client
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