Re: Serial Number For Vmware Workstation 71
Sofia Gilcrease
The issue I'm having is that several settings cannot be changed, most importantly the number of CPUs. The selection is greyed out and set to 1. Additionally, the hard disk and display (graphics) parameters cannot be edited either.
This particular limitation does not relate to the total number of VMs which are running on the host, so (as the message suggests) you should be able to just open a second instance of VMware Workstation and run more VMs in that second instance. If I remember correctly, I think we have a hard limit of 64 concurrently running VMs on Windows hosts.
According to Davius 's comments, the limitation does not relate to the number of VMs running on the host, but the number of VMs that are opened (i.e., a tab of the VM is opened). Please close VMs that are not being used. Or run another instance of VMware Workstation.
I searched the VMWare knowledge base for "limit cpu vmware workstation" (URL is -search/%40uri#q=limit%20cpu%20vmware%20workstation&t=Knowledge&sort=relevancy), and get back an error Something went wrong.
This is set per VM. To edit the settings for the VM: Select the VM; from the menu choose VM>Settings>Processors and choose "Number of processors" and "Number of cores..." How you allocate between those is less important than the product "Total processor cores'. This is the number of cores allocated to the VM.
The software activations are locked to the virtual machine using the serial number of the hard drive. You can also choose to lock it to the MAC address of the virtual machine. Are either of these two things something that can be customized and edited using VMWare? Will they automatically change if I host the virtual machine using a different Virtual Server?
I've looked inside the .vmx files (currently using a mix of VMWare Workstation 7 and VMware ESXi 4.1) and I didn't see anything in either of the files that looked like a MAC addresss or a Hard Disk serial number.
I am also dealing with AssetCentre which we have virtualized in VMware and have bound to the disk serial number. I've been trying to figure out how to display the disk serial number. Thanks for the information on how to do that within FactoryTalk. I also finally found that just doing a DIR in a command prompt in any folder on that drive shows it at the top.
I just cloned our server to another Cluster and it appears that the disk serial number stayed the same. Also, Microsoft Sysinternals provides a free tool VolumeID to change the disk serial number -us/sysinternals/bb897436.aspx. I tested it and it did successfully change the serial number which FactoryTalk noticed after rebooting. Based on my testing of the clone I don't think that I will need it, but I wanted to see if it worked.
So I found out that VMware changes Hard Disk serial number (8 character Alpha-Numeric code somehow bound to a Hard Drive or Volume) when you make a clone, and I haven't found a way to manually change it back. So... using the "DISK_SERIAL_NUM" for the Host ID is a bad idea for Rockwell products running on VMware (even though they will still recommend it).
Using Workstation 9.0, I have an Intel Core i7-3820 CPU @ 3.60 GHz, it has 4 cores and 8 threads. When making a virtual machine and choosing the Processor settings, I can only make a VM whose total processor cores equal or are less than 8 otherwise I get "The virtual machine may perform poorly or fail to power on because the total number of processor cores exceeds the maximum supported value of 8."
Well, this was a fun exercise. While building out some VMs to execute Packerimage builds for vSphere, I installed VMware Workstation via Ansible and forgotto add the serial number as part of the installation. Yes, you read that correct,running Packer builds inside a vSphere VM, within VMware Workstation. All kickedoff via GitLab CI pipelines. So, anyways, back to the issue at hand. I neededto enter a functional license key to make Packer happy with VMware Workstation.Well, something that one would think would be relatively easy, was not so much.At least for me. Because there was not a GUI, I had to figure out the CLI commandto execute. Google did not provide me with anything very useful, but finallypieced some stuff together which ended up working. So, here it is, the overlycomplex command:
However, this suggestion has a few shortcomings. Since the vCPUs are presented as Sockets alone, licensing models for Microsoft operating systems and applications were potentially limited by the number of sockets. This is less of an issue today with operating system core-based licensing, which Microsoft transitioned to starting with Windows Server 2016, but is still a consideration for earlier releases.
When it comes to configuring the processor settings for a new virtual machine, there are several key concepts to understand. These include calculating the number of processor cores per CPU and CPU cores per socket and how these settings will affect the speed of your virtual machines. In addition, you need to understand what ensures better VM performance: limiting the number of processors and having more CPU cores or having more processors with fewer cores.
CPU overcommitment is the situation when you provision more logical processors (CPU cores) of a physical host to VMs residing on the host than the total number of logical processors on the host.
Virtual NUMA (vNUMA) is the analog of NUMA for VMware virtual machines. A vNUMA consumes hardware resources of more than one physical NUMA node to provide optimal performance. The vNUMA technology exposes the NUMA topology to a guest operating system. As a result, the guest OS is aware of the underlying NUMA topology for the most efficient use. The virtual hardware version of a VM must be 8 or higher to use vNUMA. Handling of vNUMA was significantly improved in VMware vSphere 6.5, and this feature is no longer controlled by the CPU cores per socket value in the VM configuration. By default, vNUMA is enabled for VMs that have more than 8 logical processors (vCPUs). You can enable vNUMA manually for a VM by editing the VMX configuration file of the VM and adding the line numa.vcpu.min=X, where X is the number of vCPUs for the virtual machine.
The maximum number of processor cores that can be assigned to a single VM is 768 in vSphere 7.0 Update 1. A virtual machine cannot use more CPU cores than the number of logical processor cores on a physical machine.
OS CPU restrictions. If an operating system has a limit on the number of processors, and you assign more virtual processors for a VM, the additional processors are not identified and used by a guest OS. Limits can be caused by OS technical design and OS licensing restrictions. Note that there are operating systems that are licensed per-socket and per CPU core (for example, Windows Server 2019).
First of all, determine how many logical processors (Total number of CPUs) of your physical host are needed for a virtual machine for proper work with sufficient performance. Then define how many virtual sockets with processors (Number of Sockets in vSphere Client) and how many CPU cores (Cores per Socket) you should set for a VM keeping in mind previous recommendations and limitations. The table below can help you select the needed configuration.
If you need to assign more than 8 logical processors for a VM, the logic remains the same. To calculate the number of logical CPUs in vSphere Client, multiply the number of sockets by the number of cores. For example, if you need to configure a VM to use 2-processor sockets, each has 2 CPU cores, then the total number of logical CPUs is 2*2=4. It means that you should select 4 CPUs in the virtual hardware options of the VM in vSphere Client to apply this configuration.
CPU. Click the drop-down menu in the CPU string, and select the total number of needed logical processors for this VM. In this example, I select 4 logical processors for the Ubuntu VM (blog-Ubuntu1).
If you connect to vCenter Server or ESXi host in VMware Workstation and open VM settings of a vSphere VM, you can edit the basic configuration of virtual processors. Click VM > Settings, select the Hardware tab, and click Processors. On the following screenshot, you see processor configuration for the same Ubuntu VM that was configured before in vSphere Client. In the graphical user interface (GUI) of VMware Workstation, you should select the number of virtual processors (sockets) and the number of cores per processor. The number of total processor cores (logical cores of physical processors on an ESXi host or cluster) is calculated and displayed below automatically. In the interface of vSphere Client, you set the number of total processor cores (the CPUs option), select the number of cores per processor, and then the number of virtual sockets is calculated and displayed.
The main advantage of using Power CLI is the ability to configure multiple VMs in bulk. Task automation is important and convenient if the number of virtual machines to configure is high. Use VMware cmdlets and syntax of Microsoft PowerShell to create scripts.
The performance of applications running on a VM depends on the correct CPU and memory configuration. In VMware vSphere 6.5 and later versions, set more cores in CPU for virtual machines and use the CPU cores per socket approach. If you use vSphere versions older than vSphere 6.5, configure the number of sockets without increasing the number of CPU cores for a VM due to different behavior of vNUMA in newer and older vSphere versions. Take into account the licensing model of software you need to install on a VM. If the software is licensed on using a per CPU model, configure more cores per CPU in VM settings.
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