Need clarification regarding RHEL ES 2 socket limitation as it applies to VMWare Vsphere 4.1 Enterprise Edition?

Issue

• Need to confirm whether the behavior that is being seen on a VMWare guest running RHEL ES is normal or not.  According the the matrix below, a server with ES has a 2 socket limitation.

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/compare/

• Given that VM guests treat an individual a virtual CPU as a socket, it should not be possible for the guest to see more than 2 CPUs but per the output below, it is able to.  Is this because the 2 CPU limit is a soft limit or is there some special code in RHEL that can tell that that the virtual CPUs are really just cores or threads?  Please clarify.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)
(cat /proc/cpuinfo)
processor       : 3
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 23
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X7460  @ 2.66GHz
stepping        : 6
cpu MHz         : 2664.697
cache size      : 16384 KB