How do I determine the Numa Boundaries for my host

[BenJAMIN2011101]

I am in the design phase of a SQL SharePoint project.

The initial requirements that have come from the application / SQL team is for a VM with 4 virtual CPU's and 16 gig of RAM.

How can I determine if this VM will exceed the numa boundaries for my host.

My host is a HP blade BL 460c with two 2.5 ghz quad core processors. It has 120 gig of RAM and I am running ESXi ver 4.0.0 update 1.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Troy_Clavell]

do you have any other VM's running on this Host?  The specs seems a bit large for a virtual machine.  How did the application team spec out the requirements, based on knowledge of other like virtual machines, or hardware recomendations?

[BenJAMIN2011101]

Yes I will have 4 or more VM's running on this same host.   The other VM's will not have this large of a memory requirement.  4 to 6 gig will be the norm per VM.

The application team created there spec from best practicies from Microsoft and on physical hardware with a Os of Windows 2008 R2 SP1.  It was based on how large they think the SQL database (SharePoint) will become in 1 to 2 years.  They are expecting the SQL database to get to 1TB in the first year.

[Troy_Clavell]

I don't foresee you having problems with NUMA, however I would say you should spec out your VM a little lower to start out with.  Maybe 2vCPU's and 4GB RAM.  From there depending on resources requirements you can adjust up or down.  With W2K8 R2 RAM and vCPU are hot swappable, so it makes it a bit easier to adjust on the fly.

More CPU's aren't always better in a VMware enviornment.  Also, ensure you have good storage, because that could end up being your bottleneck, more so then CPU/ RAM.  We have some SQL Boxes that have some very heavy IOPS usage.

[BenJAMIN2011101]

I don't see myself having any issue either but I know there is a way to calculate the limit.

Do you or anyone know how to calculate the NUMA Boundary?

As for storage we are using a Compellent SAN with 10GB ISCSi Ethernet connections.  We are not really getting into the SAN in terms of performance, so at this point I think we will be ok in terms of IOPS.

[Troy_Clavell]

here's a good article worth checking out

http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/02/sizing-vms-and-numa-nodes/

[BenJAMIN2011101]

In reading through this article and more importantly the comments placed by some of the readers. I think I may have my answer.

I have a HP BL460c's with 2 CPU and 4 cores per CPU.

We have 12 slots of memory.  (6 per cpu)

My system has 120 GIG or RAM installed.   (per CPU = 3 x 16GB + 3 x 4GB = 60 GB. X 2  = 120 GIG for the whole system.)

Being that each CPU has 4 cores and 60 gig of Ram per CPU  I can create a VM with 4 virtual CPU's and 58 GIG of ram for one VM.  (not that I would but if I wanted too.)  I am allowing 2 gig or ram for the ESXI kernel and general head room for anything ESX related.

All of the memory can be access from a single CPU and all the virtual CPU's are all on the same CPU.

I think this very large VM would not go beyond the Numa boundaries as it can access all of the CPU and Memory from a single CPU/memory.  If I went above the 58 GIG or Ram for the VM, say to 80, It would force the memory to come from the other CPU and cause a huge drop in performance.

Could someone validate this and make sure I understood the info provided in the article.