Yet another Hyperthreading Inactive on Dell T610

[edisoninfo]

Dell T610 PowerEdge Server

2 x Dual Core Intel Xeon E5503 @ 2.000 GHz cpu's

24 GiB ram

2 x 250 GiB drives in RAID 1 for the VM's

4 x 600 GiB drives in RAID 5 for use as data drives in the VM's

Every place I can find in vSphere configs both in the gui and when ssh'd into the host shows "Hyperthreading" turned on. But vSphere status screen still shows it InActive. The BIOS shows "Virtual Technology" is enabled. It doesn't specifically say Hyperthreading but I presume that's what it refers to?

Any ideas? There are only two guests, one Windows SBS 2008 and a Windows 2008 R2 Standard which has sql server in it. The box is just not performing as good as I would like. There are about 20 workstations accessing for varsious business software. Nothing out of the ordinary.

[chriswahl]

Click on your host, go to the Configuration tab, select Hardware > Processors, then click the Properties... button in the top right corner.

Make sure the Hyperthreading box is checked for Enabled.

[edisoninfo]

The Properties link is grey'd out. I can not click on it.

[Gkeerthy]

can you directly connect the esx host by the vpshere client and check the settings

[chriswahl]

The Intel® Xeon® Processor E5503 does not support hyper-threading.

http://ark.intel.com/products/37094/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5503-(4M-Cache-2_00-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI)

[edisoninfo]

I was afraid of that. Thank you everyone!

[edisoninfo]

I know this is an older post of mine, but I wanted the background for this question. How does not having Hyperthreading affect an ESXi 5 server? There is the other setting that refers to virtual machines. Is that "instead" of HT or of no use at all?

I guess that main issue is for this server, am I in trouble? I have an SBS 2011 and an Server 2008 R2 w/SQL server running with about 12 workstations connected to it. Did I just paint myself in a corner?

[chriswahl]

Hyperthreading is just the ability to run two threads on the same core. It offers a way to better utilize the cores in situations where the VMs are not consuming a lot of processor time. The VM guest operating systems are not even aware if it exists on the host.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

You haven't done anything potentially negative to your environment by not purchasing a CPU with HT technology.

Here's an example from one of my lab servers. The PCPU numbers reflect hyperthreads, while the CORE util represents the actual core. It just slices up each core into a pair of hyper threads.