The cores vs. sockets question seems to still be in debate.  I've been reading conflicting information so I opened a support ticket with VMware yesterday and was told by support "the general rule of thumb is for 4 or fewer vCPU's go with sockets over cores (4 sockets, 1 core per socket), but anything over 4 vCPU's to go with cores over sockets (1 socket, 8 cores per socket)."  This seemed a little too broad to me at the time and sounded odd.

So what you're saying is the best practice is to always go with cores over sockets (1 socket, 8 cores per socket) assuming that you don't surpass your physical core count per socket?  This is also assuming you don't have a reason to go the opposite route because of a specific application.

Is that correct?  If so, that seems to contradict what support literally just told me yesterday.