I have an ESXi 5 server running on a 2-processor, 12-core system with hyperthreading enabled. So: 12 physical cores, 24 logical ones. On this server are 4 Windows 7 VMs, each configured for 2 processors, each running VMware Tools.

Looking at my stats in vSphere, my "core utilization" is constantly maxed out. Yes, these machines are working hard, but only 8 cores have been allocated. How is this possible? Should I look into reducing the processor count per machine as in this post: VMware ESX server?

I checked to ensure that hardware virtualization is enabled in the BIOS of the machine (a DELL R410). I've also started reading up on configuration, but being a newbie there's a lot of material to catch up on. It also seems I should only bother with advanced settings and pools if I'm really pushing the load, and I don't think that I should be pushing it with so few VMs.

I suspect that I have some basic, incorrect configuration setting, but it's also possible that I have some giant misconceptions about virtualization. Any pointers?

EDIT: Given the responses I've gotten so far, it seems that this is a measurement problem and not a configuration problem, making this less critical. Perhaps the real question is: How does the core utilization of the server reach a higher percentage than all individual cores' core utilization, and given that this possibility makes the metric useless for overall server load, what is the best global metric for measuring CPU load on hyper-threaded systems?