Enabling HyperThreading for vSphere Servers

A question that comes up often is should hyper-threading be enabled for a vSphere (ESX) Server?

The short answer is Yes.  In all cases that I'm aware of, it has no downside and upside could be as big as a 25 percent gain in performance.

Hyper-threading allows for multiple threads to run on the same physical core or processor.  On the current generation of server chips this generally means that you get twice as many logical processors or threads as you have physical cores.  This does not however lead to a 2x increase in performance because these are just logical threads and not actual cores.  It allows for the CPUs to be more fully utilized and squeeze out another 20% or so of performance.

So why would anybody even ask if it should be enabled or not?  I think that there are two reasons.

The first is that an earlier version of Hyper-threading from about ten years ago didn't always provide a performance boost and in some cases did cause performance to get worse.  This lead to a recommendation at the time to test  performance before enabling it.  Many people remember this and are still wary of Hyper-threading.

The other reason is that there are some application vendors that recommend disabling HT even on the current chips with the better implementation.  While they probably have a valid reason for recommending this, it does not apply when the app is running in a VM on vSphere.  I would assume that the application (or OS) is in some way not HT aware and could do a very inefficient job of scheduling, using logical threads like physical cores.

With vSphere 4 and 5, the scheduler is hyper-thread aware and makes intelligent decisions on where to schedule processes.  This allows it to overcome an application or OS that is not HT aware.  The scheduler will take advantage of the extra logical threads when it needs them, but will prioritize things to be running on a core all alone if possible.

In the common scenario where there are many VMs running on a single vSphere host, all of these extra threads give the scheduler lots more options and flexibility to give the VMs what they need when they need it. This leads to better performance for all of the VMs with generally a 10 to 20 percent advantage over the same system with HT disabled.

Even if you are only going to assign a number of vCPUs that is equal to the number of physical cores, you should still enable HT.  The hypervisor will be able to use the extra CPU capacity from HT for the functions that it must do, without having to interrupt the VM as much as if HT was disabled.

From a performance engineering perspective, we sometimes run tests (or ask customers to run tests) without HT enabled for debugging purposes.  It is sometimes easier to do performance comparisons without HT enabled and sometimes we need to get a baseline in performance without it running, but I always have it enabled when trying to get the best absolute numbers.

Todd