Article ID: 000036898 Content Type: Product Information & Documentation Last Reviewed: 05/05/2023

How Many Virtual Processors (vCPUs) Are within an Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors?

Environment

Any Intel® Xeon® Processor  

Windows Server 2022 Family, Windows Server 2019 family*, VMware*

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Summary

Number of Virtual Processors (vCPUs) in Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

Description

Wondering how many vCPUs (Virtual CPUs or Virtual Processors) are in an Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor

Resolution

There is no specific amount, ratio, or formula to determine the number of Virtual CPUs (vCPUs or Virtual Processors) from a physical CPU (pCPU or physical processor). Determining the ratio or how many vCPUs to allocate (or provision or subscribe) is dependent on the operating system used and the application or workload being virtualized.

Some operating systems and software applications view the physical processor as logical processors. A logical processor is the number of the processor's cores multiplied by the number of threads per core. vCPUs are actually the amounts of of time a virtual machine gets on a logical processor. The number of cores and threads of an Intel processor can be found in the Intel's Technical Specifications website by searching by processor number.

Some operating systems will have a maximum on number of vCPUs. It is recommended to start with 1:1 vCPU-to-pCPU ratio, and then scale up the number of vCPUs while assessing performance.

If using VMware*, it's recommended to check the VMware documentation on how to best subscribe or provision vCPU resources. Some suggested VMware website resources include:

If using Windows*, some suggested website resources for information related to vCPUs include: