If you have applications that use a lot of memory or have a small number of virtual machines, you might want to optimize performance by specifying virtual machine CPU and memory placement explicitly.
Specifying controls is useful if a virtual machine runs a memory-intensive workload, such as an in-memory database or a scientific computing application with a large data set. You might also want to optimize NUMA placements manually if the system workload is known to be simple and unchanging. For example, an eight-processor system running eight virtual machines with similar workloads is easy to optimize explicitly.
ESXi provides three sets of controls for NUMA placement, so that administrators can control memory and processor placement of a virtual machine.
The vSphere Web Client lets you specify the following options.
- NUMA Node Affinity
- When you set this option, NUMA can schedule a virtual machine only on the nodes specified in the affinity.
- CPU Affinity
- When you set this option, a virtual machine uses only the processors specified in the affinity.
- Memory Affinity
- When you set this option, the server allocates memory only on the specified nodes.
A virtual machine is still managed by NUMA when you specify NUMA node affinity, but its virtual CPUs can be scheduled only on the nodes specified in the NUMA node affinity. Likewise, memory can be obtained only from the nodes specified in the NUMA node affinity. When you specify CPU or memory affinities, a virtual machine ceases to be managed by NUMA. NUMA management of these virtual machines is effective when you remove the CPU and memory affinity constraints.
Manual NUMA placement might interfere with ESXi resource management algorithms, which distribute processor resources fairly across a system. For example, if you manually place 10 virtual machines with processor-intensive workloads on one node, and manually place only 2 virtual machines on another node, it is impossible for the system to give all 12 virtual machines equal shares of systems resources.
