Hi there,
No worries. Glad it sort of made sense.
The guest OS, Windows Server 2008 R2 standard in this case, will only use 4 vCPUs out of the 7. The "extra" 3 will be unused and wasted. If you look within SQL Server Management Studio you will see that SQL cannot access the "additional" processors either. If the OS CPU scheduler cannot use them (ignore device manager) then they are not available for application use.
Also without getting too far off track, this virtual hardware configuration has the potential to be causing performance issues on the virtual machine due to the co-scheduling of the vCPUs, i.e. the VMKernel has to schedule 7 vCPUs even though the guest can only use 4. Not normally a problem if you need all 7 vCPU but given in this case 3 are completely idle due to licensing, it is again a waste.
Now in regards to licenses, if you are talking SQL licenses then "YES" you could be paying for additional licenses that you cannot access. If you are referring to Windows OS licenses then "NO" - standard license covers 4 sockets there is no additional cost for the other 3 apart from being a unneccessary.
Two options that I see:
- upgrade/install Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise which allows upto 8 sockets (NB: SQL 2012 standard allows 4 sockets or 16 cores so be careful here as well)
- re-configure VM for multiple cores per socket (recommended)
Kind regards.