The processor in this host is an Intel Xeon Gold 6142 @2.60GHZ. As I stated in my original post, sub-numa clustering is enabled per best practice giving us 4 NUMA nodes.

OsburnM - the article you linked to is the same one I linked to. This article gives best practice for configuring individual VMs in terms of sockets and cores per socket. All of my VMs are configured with 1 socket following the advice in this article

This still does not answer my original question. The whole reason to stay within a NUMA node/boundary is to make sure the VM uses local memory and not remote memory. All of my VMs are contained within a single NUMA node but I still have some VMs that are using a considerable amount of remote memory. Here is another screenshot from ESXTOP.

Why is my VM called Ruckus1 getting half of its memory remotely? Ruckus1 is a Linux based server

Why is Camera1 getting 1/3 of its memory remotely? Camera1 is a Windows server

Is there something going on at the OS level that explains this?

Perhaps ESXTOP is just not reporting this correctly? Some other factor I am not taking into account?