[question] Testing Virtualized XP installs with more than two CPUs.

So Windows XP Pro allows the user to run at most two physical processors, but each such processor can have as many cores as you like. That's great for quad-core and above processors, if the operating system is running directly on top of the hardware.

So what if you have a quad-core or dual-quad-core system, you're running some virtualization package (KVM, VMWare Server, whatever), and you want your guest XP Pro instance to have more than two cores? On QEMU+KVM, there's no way to lump virtual CPUs as cores on a virtual physical processor, and there doesn't appear to be one on VMWare ESX Server, either. So how would you do it?

The particular scenario, in this case, is automated testing of software that's supposed to run on XP Pro with systems between four and eight cores. While it stands to reveal interesting bugs, running it on only two cores is non-optimal.

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:wq