I read through search results in the forum to try to find an answer before posting, but I still don't feel clear on this.
In short, we want to place multiple Standard Edition instances on a server (non-virtualized) with more than 16 CPU cores which is running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise.
I understand that each instance is limited to using 16 cores, but does that mean that all of the instances combined will still only access CPU0-CPU15, and CPU16+ will be completely unused by any SQL Server instance?
I would like to avoid using Processor Affinity, as I am not a real DBA and am not confident in my ability (yet) to recognize when a misconfiguration is causing a problem. I'm just hoping that the load will be spread across all CPUs automatically, though each instance will only use 16 each.