At TransIP you can use a SandboxVPS, VPS or PerformanceVPS as a virtual server. The former two use shared and the latter uses dedicated CPU cores. The difference between these (simply put) is that shared CPU cores you use the same CPU cores of a hypervisor together with other VPSs. With dedicated CPU cores, the cores are reserved for you, regardless of whether you fully utilize them or not.
We illustrate this with an example scenario: We assume a hypervisor with 50 CPU cores and 100 CPU hyperthreads. We then only place VPSs with 4 CPU threads each on the hypervisor.
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PerformanceVPS: CPU cores are dedicated, or reserved for you. The number of VPSs on a hypervisor is therefore the number of CPU cores of that hypervisor, divided by the number of available CPU cores per VPS. In this example, there could be 100 (threads) / 4 = 25 VPSs on this hypervisor.
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Regular VPS: CPU cores are shared, in other words you share the cores of a hypervisor with other VPSs. Suppose that each VPS on a hypervisor uses an average of 50% of its available CPU cores, then there can be twice as many VPS's on one hypervisor than with a PerformanceVPS, or 50 VPS's.
Additional reading tip: Shared cores can play a role in the emergence of steal-time and is one of the reasons why we use automatic migrations on our VPS platform. More information about automatic migrations can be found in this article.
This means that more regular VPSs can be on one hypervisor at the same time than is possible with Performance VPSs. For example, this plays a role in the price of Windows Server licenses, see this article.
That brings us to the end of this article about dedicated and shared CPU cores.
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