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 the virtual machine and select Edit Settings.
3. Click the Advanced Parameters tab.
4. (Optional) To add a parameter, enter an attribute name and value for the parameter and click Add.
5. (Optional) To change a parameter, enter a new value in the Value text box for that parameter and click the check mark to confirm.
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.