I have a VM ware / SQL Licensing / CPU / hyperthreading question. We are planning on purchasing new hardware to move from bare metal and virtulize. We are running SQL 2012 Enterprise licensed for 12 cores bare metal (E5-2643-v2). It is hyperthreaded so SQL sees 24 CPUs. We are running 50-70% CPU all the time, with peaks to 100 that last for a few minutes. We are trying to avoid addtional licensing costs, but want to have some protection if we need more CPU in the future. So we want to purchase an R740 and virtualize, purchasing more cores than they have now eg - 6146 (12C), which would double our core count. If we hyperthread the host we will have 48 cores available. The VMWare for SQL guide says to hyperthread and then start by provisioning the number of cores to the guest equal to the physical core count. So the plan would be to provision 12 cores to the guest OS. This seems to me like we will loose a significant amount of processing power. Would we be better to purchase a comparable CPU (6128 - 6C) and license at the host, then if they have problems purchase both new CPU's and increase the license?
Thanks,
John
