I have a Mac Pro with the following specs:
- 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2 processor
- 32-GB of RAM
- Mac OS 10.10.2
- VMWare Fusion v7.1.1
- Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) guest OS
- Processors selected: 4 cores (out of a max of 16)
- Preferred virtualization engine: Automatic
I got a copy of Belarc Advisor and ran it trying to get an understanding of my Windows environment. The Belarc report specifies:
- 3.00 gigahertz Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2
- 2048 kilobyte primary memory cache
- 64-bit ready
- multi-core (2 total)
- Not hyper-threaded
The above report raises some questions over my Fusion configuration and/or the Belarc report.
- When I go to select the number of processors it lists it in the number of cores, not processors, so I see 16 processors. OK, I understand part of this, but not all:
- The E5-1680 v2 processor has 8 cores with hyper-threading on this chip, and hyper-threading allows two concurrent threads. So I assume that Fusion is reporting 8*2 = 16 processors.
- When given the option to select the number of processors I have the option to select 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 16 "processor cores". How can Fusion manage an odd number of "processor cores"?
- I have specified 4 processor cores at the moment.
- When I run Belarc within the Windows enviroment it correctly tells me that I have 2 Multi-core processor (total 4 "processor cores")
- Then Belarc tells me Not hyper-threaded. Windows natively does support hyper-threading, so is Fusion faking out Windows somehow and doing the hyper-threading instead of allowing Windows to do it? This is what it looks like.
- I set the Preferred virtualization engine setting to Automatic instead of Intel VT-x with EPT and reran the report:
- I did not see a change in the Belarc report
- Is Fusion detecting that I do support VT-x with EPT and automatically using it? If so how can I confirm this?
I may eventually have more questions, but this is all I have come across so far.