@jasonnix Yes, a vCPU means a virtual CPU, which is the assignment of a VM to a physical CPU core.
Servers have sockets that contain physical CPUs, so it sounds like your system has four sockets, holding four physical CPUs.
Each physical CPU can have multiple cores and in some cases, one thread per core or in others, two threads per core, but let's stick
to the simpler case here.
A configuration of 4 cores with 1 core per socket means each of the 4 vCPUs will reside on a core on four separate physical CPU sockets,
so all four physical CPUs are accessed. This is in most cases not ldeal as in many servers with 4 physical CPUs, the memory banks are split between pairs of CPUs,
two on one bank, two on the other. Having VMs cross over physical CPU memory bank boundaries is generally inefficient and should
be avoided if possible. This is why NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) and vNUMA become important in the configuration.
And @gskger is correct that licensing can sometimes depend on the configuration.
I should add that under some circumstances, configuring the CPUs for turbo mode can be an advantage.
Suggested reading: my article on the effects of vCPU and GPU allocations in a three-part set of articles. In particular, Part 3 addresses
NUMA and configuration issues and Part 2 discusses turbo mode.
I hope this helps as it is initially quite confusing.
https://community.citrix.com/citrix-community-articles/a-tale-of-two-servers-how-bios-settings-can-affect-your-apps-and-gpu-performance/
https://community.citrix.com/citrix-community-articles/a-tale-of-two-servers-part-2-how-not-only-bios-settings-but-also-gpu-settings-can-affect-your-apps-and-gpu-performance/
https://community.citrix.com/citrix-community-articles/a-tale-of-two-servers-part-3-the-influence-of-numa-cpus-and-sockets-cores-persocket-plus-other-vm-settings-on-apps-and-gpu-performance/
