I'm currently using ESXi 5 free. I just did a test and went thru the menu on creating a new VM and I can select 24 cores. The free license says I'm limited to 8 vCPUs, how come I can select 24 vCPUs?
Product: VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor Licensed for 2 physical CPUs (unlimited cores per CPU)
Product Features:
Up to 32 GB of memory
Up to 8-way virtual SMP
Thanks