Q: I noticed that in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), I can set the CPU type and speed for a virtual machine (VM). What does this do?

A: When you configure a VM with VMM, you can set the number of virtual processors available to a VM (which you can also do with the standard Hyper-V manager MMC console), and you can also set a CPU type and speed. This setting makes no changes at all to the CPU capability within the VM—the virtual CPU is still mapped to whatever processor cores/threads are in the server. The CPU type and speed setting is used by VMM only to help in its placement calculations, as part of the expected CPU use. Even if you set a VM to have an old, slow CPU, it will get exactly the same number of CPU cycles as one set to have a newer, faster CPU.