Windows – How many cores can windows 2003 support

To answer your first question: http://www.richweb.com/cpu_info describes all the cpuinfo output in good detail with some interesting discussion following the article.

In your case it's reporting that your VM is configured to show itself to the OS as a two-physical-core VM. The bare metal under the VM might be 1 core or 100 cores but as far as the OS in the VM is concerned you've got a machine with two physical processors that it can play with. It knows nothing of how threads that it assigns to those processors are actually being run on the physical hardware underneath the VM.

To get somewhat similar information from a Windows CMD shell you can try the systeminfo command from a CMD shell. It displays a whole lot more than the /proc/cpuinfo stuff in Linux, but also not quite as much detail about the actual processors themselves.

I don't know the answer to your third question, sorry.

Actually, no. A dual core processor is one processor with 2 cores, a quad core is one processor with 4 cores.. and so on.Hyperthreading dosen't come onto play yet

Lets take a 8 core processor, and have them on a hypothetical 8 processor SMP system. You have 8 processors with 64 physical cores . Hyperthreading lets you run 128 logical cores on them. Likewise the same setup with quadcores would have 8 processors with 32 physical cores, and with hyperthreading run up to 64 logical cores (which is the maximum in the windows server enterprise would be able to run).

Apparently in this case, a logical core is equivalent to the ability to run a thread.

EDIT: cleaned up the answer. Apparently i misunderstood it - the hyperthreading article on wikipedia was really useful here