Here is what coreinfo is reporting on a VM that is using quite a bit of remote memory. The operating system is showing no NUMA nodes

Here is what I am focusing on: "In my point of view, the only reason that you are using the remote memory is that there is no NUMA node exposed to your guest os and you are using more capacity than one NUMA node."

I started looking at CPU and Memory usage inside the guest OS (rather than what is being reported by ESXi). Here is what I am seeing on this server which is running Windows Server 2012 R2

It does not appear I am exhausting the resources devoted to this machine. This VM has 1 socket, 4 cores per socket, and 10GB of RAM. Again, the VMWare performance team article I linked to recommends that nearly all VMs have 1 socket and then scale up using cores per socket. I could swap this and configure this VM with 1 core per socket and 4 sockets.

The oddest thing is when I look at ESXTOP, I see VMs that are using 80% remote memory and then it will suddenly change to 2% remote memory. Wait a short period and it will bounce back to a 70 or 80% remote memory. I cannot account for this bouncing around. Other VMs stay rock solid with nearly all memory is local