RedMallorca LAB

Those of you who are running VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi on an Intel Xeon X3430 CPU based HP Proliant ML110 G6 may have attempted to try and enable the Hyperthreading within ESX or ESXi after seeing that it was currently ‘Disabled’ within the ‘Configuration’ tab of the vCenter client and that all supposedly needs doing is it enabling in the BIOS of the server.

Without wishing to be the bearer of bad news unfortunately your Intel Xeon X3430 CPU in your particular model of ML110 G6 doesn’t actually have Hyperthreading installed on the CPU’s die.  VMware ESX/ESXi seems to identify that your ML110 G6 does have an Intel Xeon X3400 series CPU installed though doesn’t distinguish between the various sub-models of this CPU some of which do have Hyperthreading.  The X3430 is the only CPU in the X3400 series without Hyperthreading, for a complete list of which Intel CPUs come with Hyperthreading and which don’t check out this list here. 

So the result is that despite the vCenter client telling you to enable Hyperthreading in the BIOS of your X3430 based ML110 G6 you’ll be looking a long time as you won’t be able to.

One very important point to note however is that there are models of HP ML110 G6 that do come with Xeon CPUs such as the X3440 which do in fact have Hyperthreading capabilities which can be utilised within ESX/ESXi

Hope this helps avoid any confusion. 

Related posts:

1. VMware ESXi Purple Screen of Death on HP Proliant ML110 or ML115 A common occurrence discovered by HP Proliant ML110 and ML115…
2. HP Announce Intel Xeon 5600 CPU update to their Proliant Server Range HP have recently announced the release of the new Intel…
3. VMware ESX & ESXi Error – Can’t boot system as genuine NUMA When running a virtualized instance of ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 1…

Via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techhead/~3/jV2Xegef2P4/hyperthreading-in-vmware-esx-or-esxi-with-an-hp-proliant-ml110-g6