Q: What is the maximum number of physical sockets and cores that Windows Server 2008 R2 supports?
Windows Server 2008 R2 supports a varying number of sockets depending on the edition.
March 20, 2012
A: With the availability of processors that now have many CPUs, there are physical processors (or sockets) and logical processors (cores on a processor). With logical processors, hyper-threading, if it's used, can double the number of logical processors.
Windows Server 2008 R2 supports a varying number of sockets based on the edition:
Windows Server 2008 R2 Web and Standard support four sockets.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise supports eight sockets.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter supports 64 sockets.
The maximum number of logical processors supported is 256. However, remember Hyper-V only uses up to 64 logical processors.
These numbers are changing for Windows Server 8, which in the developer preview supports 640 logical processors and 160 logical processors for Hyper-V. These could change for Windows Server 8 RTM.
Read FAQs about Windows, virtualization, systems management and more at John Savill's FAQs for Windows.
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