ESXI - Cores per socket grayed out ?

[vswitch123]

Hello,

New to esxi and mainly using for lab.

I've encountered an issue when trying to deploy another testvm on the hypervisor.

I'm running on esxi 7.0 U2 (free edition) installed on R630 (e5-2667 v4).

• Logical processors
  32
• Processor type
  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GHz
• Sockets
  2
• Cores per socket
  8

I have 11 vms (most 2 sockets/4 treads - all under utilized) and I've noticed when trying to create a new vm cores per socket are greyed out. Screen grab for details on the greyed portion > https://postimg.cc/gallery/mPzdvsF

Interesting observation, I’ve noticed that when I deleted vm that was shutdown(2s/4c), the socket count got enabled again for the new vm.

No snapshots, templates, cpu reservations etc.. simple deployment.

Could someone tell me Is this license issue or perhaps i'm hitting some kind of hardware limitation on that host?

Thank you in advance!

[Maks Roshchyna]

Let's start from simple - you will be able to change cores and sockets of VMs when they are only powered off.

Is it your physical ESXi host or nested? 

Standalone or multiple hosts in the cluster? 

 

 

[Tibmeister]

This can only be changed when the VM is powered off because of the vNUMA configuration.  Overall, leave this as 1 core per socket unless a specific need arises, like licensing.  Changing this setting cause a lot of issues and provides no performance benefit as vNUMA will automatically adjust to be optimal on your hardware.