VMware Cloud Community
swerly01
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

cpu0.0 Numa 836: Significan imbalance between NUMA nodes

Ok... so I did the upgrade to ESX 4.0.0 on 4 DL385 G5's and now i get this error.

When we upgraded the RAM the dumb server makes you stack memmory from greatest to lowest makeing it impossable to equilize the memmory between processors inless you had a few million to put enough ram in each server.

I figured since we had been running so long this way it wasn't a big deal... untill...

We have a vendor wanting a new server installed. So I built them a VM, apparently they run a program that tests the performance of the server. The server i built them had two cores and two gigs of ram. What I felt to be plenty... but, when they ran the proformance test they got a score of 21. They were under the impression that we had only gave them one processor. A score of 100 is required for there software to be installed on the server. Well i decided to run my own tests with there benchmarking utility and these are my processor results on the VM.

Processor Bench Score

1 21

2 42

3 62

4 74

I don't want to give more than 4 cores to a single VM.

So i took the tool and put it on a real life physical server and ran the tool with the score of 367. Mind you this server has 8 threads..

But my real question is... Is the slowness an issue of the NUMA error or is it just our Host, and also, what precentages of speed are lost by the NUMA error and is it worth equaling the RAM out?

Some one help please.

Thanks,

Tom Bryan

0 Kudos
1 Reply
babyg_wc
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Have you disabled Node Interleaving in the BIOS? If you have unbalanced memory between nodes, then you need to run in UMA (not NUMA) mode.

I suspect that NUMA will be disabled by ESX given your nodes aint balanced.

Better still, balance the RAM (for testing purposed) and see how your tests go.

0 Kudos