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I have a Windows Server 2012 VM that has only been assigned a single core; I'd like to know if the HAL for the machine is multi-core capable before requesting more cores be added to the VM.

Is there some WMIC command, regedit value, or some other indicator?

I know in previous versions of Windows, I could tell by looking at the "oroginal file name" property for %SystemRoot%\System32\hal.dll -> Windows Server 2012 only shows "hal.dll".

I've looked through the MACHINE registry hive, but can't find anything close to meaningful. I've also Googled "site:microsoft.com windows server hal multiprocessor", but none of the results are helpful.

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  • As far as I know 2012 and later have only SMP HAL, so it's not an issue. And even 2008 will switch between them automatically.
    – Michael Hampton
    Mar 19, 2015 at 21:34

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On x64 machines (and Server 2012 is always x64,) there is only one HAL image, called Hal.dll. (And it is always SMP-capable.)

However, as an academic experiment, if you want to see what HAL you are running, you can use Windbg and issue the command lm vm hal. Of course, on Server 2012, it will always be Hal.dll.

On older, x86 versions of Windows, you might see different HALs here, such as Halacpi.dll or Halmacpi.dll.

Here is an example of using LiveKD (from Sysinternals) :

livekd

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