Given this scenario, which three statements are true?

A customer is virtualizing a mission-critical Microsoft SQL database and needs a configuration that provides optimal NUMA performance.

• There are two possible clusters that the database virtual machine could reside in: Cluster A is vSphere 6.0 and Cluster B is vSphere 6.5.

• All ESXi hosts contain dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v3 processors (ie: 2 socket, 10 cores per socket) and 256Gb RAM with vNUMA in its default configuration.

Given this scenario, which three statements are true? (Choose three.)

A. Enabling CPU Hot Add on a virtual machine will disable vNUMA.

B. Placing a 10 vCPU VM in Cluster A and configuring it with 2 Sockets and 5 Cores Per Socket will result in 2 vNUMA nodes.

C. Placing a 10 vCPU VM in Cluster B and configuring it with 2 Sockets and 5 Cores Per Socket will result in 2 vNUMA nodes.

D. Enabling Memory Hot Add on a virtual machine will disable vNUMA.

E. Placing the VM in Cluster B and configuring it with 5 Sockets and 2 Cores Per Socket will result in 1 vNUMA node.

View Answer

Answer: ABE

Explanation:

vSphere 6.5 introduced Autosizing of vNUMA, meaning that it will not follow the Cores per Socket configuration of the VM, but rather automatically calculate the vNUMA nodes (https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/solutions/sql-server-on-vmware-best-practices-guide.pdf) Therefore:

A) True ("vNUMA is not exposed if the “CPU hot add” feature is enabled")

B) True (a NUMA node per socket on 6.0)

C) False (10 vCPU, a pNUMA node is 10 cores, therefore 6.5 will autosize to 1 vNUMA node)

D) False (this is only for CPU hot add, not memory)

E) True (10 vCPU, a pNUMA node is 10 cores, therefore 6.5 will autosize to 1 vNUMA node)