Hello Mike,
as refference use this guide:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf
I just extracted some of the technical recommendations from docs which I hope will help you with resource setup questions.
I would recommend you to leave all the work on ESXi itself and its NUMA scheduler first thing you can always do is properly size your VMs see below.
So I suggest to leave all the affinity (CPU, NUMA) options behind unless you must use them in some rare and extreme circumstances...
Size your virtual machines so they align with physical NUMA boundaries. For example, if you have a host system with six cores per NUMA node, size your virtual machines with a multiple of six vCPUs (i.e., 6vCPUs, 12 vCPUs, 18 vCPUs, 24 vCPUs, and so on).
The NUMA scheduling and memory placement policies in ESXi can manage all virtual machines transparently, so that administrators do not need to address the complexity of balancing virtual machines between nodes explicitly.
vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center
ESXi uses a sophisticated NUMA scheduler to dynamically balance processor load and memory locality or processor load balance.
1. Each virtual machine managed by the NUMA scheduler is assigned a home node. A home node is one of the system’s NUMA nodes containing processors and local memory, as indicated by the System Resource Allocation Table (SRAT).
2. When memory is allocated to a virtual machine, the ESXi host preferentially allocates it from the home node. The virtual CPUs of the virtual machine are constrained to run on the home node to maximize memory locality.
3. The NUMA scheduler can dynamically change a virtual machine's home node to respond to changes in system load. The scheduler might migrate a virtual machine to a new home node to reduce processor load imbalance.
Because this might cause more of its memory to be remote, the scheduler might migrate the virtual machine’s memory dynamically to its new home node to improve memory locality.
The NUMA scheduler might also swap virtual machines between nodes when this improves overall memory locality.
Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5
(page 22)
NUMA
The intelligent, adaptive NUMA scheduling and memory placement policies in ESXi can manage all virtual
machines transparently, so that administrators don’t need to deal with the complexity of balancing virtual
machines between nodes by hand.
Manual controls are available to override this default behavior, however, and advanced administrators might prefer
to manually set NUMA placement (through the numa.nodeAffinity advanced option).
By default, ESXi NUMA scheduling and related optimizations are enabled only on systems with a total of at least four CPU cores and with at least two CPU cores per NUMA node.
(page 44)
vNUMA
When creating a virtual machine you have the option to specify the number of virtual sockets and the
number of cores per virtual socket. In general, we recommend leaving this at the default value of 1 core
per socket (with the number of virtual sockets therefore equal to the number of vCPUs).
If the number of cores per virtual socket on a vNUMA-enabled virtual machine is set to any value other
than the default of 1, and that value doesn't align with the underlying physical host topology, performance
might be slightly reduced. Therefore if a virtual machine is to be configured with a non-default number
of cores per virtual socket, for best performance that number should be an integer multiple or integer
divisor of the physical NUMA node size.
In some cases, setting the number of cores per virtual socket to the number of cores per physical NUMA
node shows a performance improvement.
- By default, vNUMA is enabled only for virtual machines with more than eight vCPUs
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Regards,
P.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider to award points. (use Correct or Helpful buttons)
Regards,
P.
