VMware Cloud Community
MGarito
Contributor
Contributor

VCSA 7 Disable CPU Hot Add

 

Spoiler
By default VCSA 7 installs with CPU Hot Add Enable.
Because vCPU is enabled, Skyline Heath Diagnostics tags the ESXi host running the VCSA with the following error message by 

DIAGNOSTICS.VM.KB2040375: VM vNUMA is disabled
If virtual NUMA is configured with vCPU hotplug settings, the virtual machine will be started without virtual NUMA and instead it will use Uniform Memory Access with interleaved memory access.

1) Question: Can "CPU Hot Add" be disabled on VCSA 7 without causing instability?

2) Feedback for VCSA engineering team: 
   a) If CPU Hot Add is truly optional on VCSA, please consider making the default disabled.
   b) If CPU Hot Add is truly necessary on VCSA, please have SHD updated to stop flagging this as an issue.  

 

0 Kudos
1 Reply
Tibmeister
Expert
Expert

I have always found it odd that it's enabled, but, the best practice is to not enable CPU or Memory Hot-Add unless absolutely needed.  Honestly, I wish they would just remove that option, it's no good anyway.

Like the message states, it messes with vNUMA, which can cause performance issues on the VM.  It's not as bad as it used to be, but in reality, dynamically changing the CPU or RAM of a running machine is a terrible idea, even if you don't BSOD/Panic the guest OS immediately, a reboot is required for the various items, such as Memory Randomization to properly function, and running processes don't magically start seeing or using the new CPU(s), if those processes are multi-threaded to begin with.  At the minimum, a restart of services/applications is needed, so you are still taking an outage.