SOLVED Virtual CPU Question

[Clinderw]

My system has a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 @ 2.20GHz platform. I've been playing around with creating my first windows VM in my FreeNAS box. There is a question about how many virtual CPUs I'd like to allocate which leads me to some questions.

CPU Spec sheet - https://ark.intel.com/products/6461...E5-2430-15M-Cache-2_20-GHz-7_20-GTs-Intel-QPI
Cores = 6
Threads = 12

Questions:
1. What are the max amount of virtual CPUs I could assign?
2. While I know subjective, what is a recommended range for running windows 10? Thinking of running an ispy set up in the VM but nothing else majorly intensive.
3. Is it possible to increase virtual CPU amount after creating windows VM?

Other notables about my system:
1. 48GB Ram
2. FreeNAS-11.1-RELEASE

Thanks in advance

 

[nightshade00013]

You can assign all of them currently but it would not be very good for the system overall. Max I would assign total to VM's is N core's - 2 so in your case ten.

Yes you can change the number later on if you need more. I would start off with four and see how it works. I would also dedicate at least 6GB of ram if not 8GB. For iSpy you may even benefit from installing a separate SSD to hold the VM data and then just use SMB for storing the saved video's so they are easily accessible from the network.

 

[Clinderw]

Thank you. Dumb question - am I interpreting correctly that I need to base capacity off the number of threads available?

My current set up is giving the VM 6 virtual CPUs and 12GB of ram - sounds like that's sufficient.

Appreciate the help

 

[nightshade00013]

Well the number of cores ≠ threads. Hyperthreading however does allow each core to run two concurrent threads (and presents the os with the appearance of twice the number of physical cores) though there will be penalties if one core has two threads using the same resources.

I would imagine that having 6 cores and 12GB of ram should be fine just remember that that ram and cores is dedicated to the VM so if you start another VM for whatever reason you can not assign more than 5 cores to it or you will probably end up having issues and I would only run a total of 10 cores for VM's. Same goes for the ram you have 36 GB left for use and you need to leave no less than 16GB free for FreeNAS to use and I would not drop it below 24 GB if you are running VM's and other stuff.

 

[Clinderw]

Thank you - appreciate the recommendation and the explanation.