Associate Virtual Machines with Specified NUMA Nodes

When you associate a NUMA node with a virtual machine to specify NUMA node affinity, you constrain the set of NUMA nodes on which ESXi can schedule a virtual machine's virtual CPU and memory.

Note: When you constrain NUMA node affinities, you might interfere with the ability of the ESXi NUMA scheduler to rebalance virtual machines across NUMA nodes for fairness. Specify NUMA node affinity only after you consider the rebalancing issues.

Procedure

1. Browse to the VM in the vSphere Client.
2. Right-click and select Edit Settings.
3. Select the VM Options tab and expand Advanced.
4. Under Configuration Parameters, click the Edit Configuration button.
5. Click Add Row to add a new option.
6. 
   
   • To specify NUMA node for the virtual machine, in the Name column, enter numa.nodeAffinity.
   • To specify NUMA node for a specific Virtual NUMA node on the virtual machine, in the Name column, enter sched.nodeX.affinity, where X is the Virtual NUMA node number. For example, sched.node0.affinity specifies Virtual NUMA node 0 on the virtual machine.
7. In the Value column, enter the NUMA nodes where the virtual machine or the virtual NUMA node can be scheduled.
   Use a comma-separated list for multiple nodes. For example, enter 0,1 to constrain the virtual machine resource scheduling to NUMA nodes 0 and 1.
8. Click OK.
9. Click OK to close the Edit Settings dialog box.