Virtual machine has 12 virtual cpus but the host only supports 8?

[clovett09]

Hi everybody I am using ESX 5.1 and have a Windows 2012 R2 Standard guest virtual machine (vmx-09) that I am trying to upgrade from 8 cpus to 12 cpus.  But when I power up the virtual machine after changing it to 12 cpus I get the error message,

"Virtual machine has 12 virtual cpus, but the host only supports 8. The number of virtual cpus may be limited by the guest OS selected for the virtual machine or by the licensing for the host."

Now I know Windows 2012 R2 Standard can handle 12 cpus and I thought ESX 5.1 could also but am I incorrect?  It is the vSphere 5 Standard license.  Thanks!

[schepp]

Hi,

vSphere 5.1 Standard license has a 8 vCPU per VM limit.

                    Enterprise = 32 vCPU

                    Enterprise+ 64 vCPU

You should upgrade to vSphere 5.5. This can be done with your vSphere 5 license, as it's for all vSphere 5.X versions and the vCPU limit was removed in 5.5.

So you can have as many vCPU per VM as your host has logical Cores.

Tim

[clovett09]

Thanks for the quick answer Tim!