vSphere and NUMA BIOS settings
Posted: August 3rd, 2010 | Author: Fabio Rapposelli | Filed under: Virtualization | Tags: BIOS, CPU, Node Interleaving, NUMA, pCPU, vCPU, VMware, vSphere | 1 Comment »
I had a brief conversation with a customer the other day regarding NUMA best practices with Intel Nehalem processors.
The customer was deploying two full blade chassis with vSphere and was wondering if enabling the NUMA Node Interleave option in the BIOS was a good choice, he was arguing that by enabling this option the memory performance would be leveled for all the system but I suggested him that this was not the case with vSphere.
In fact if you enable Node Interleave you will negatively affect vSphere memory performance because the VMkernel try optimize the memory placement using the memory banks controlled by the CPU on which the virtual machine is running.
Node Interleaving is usually disabled in most Server BIOSes, but if you’re diagnosing a performance issue which is memory bound go check this BIOS setting, it can really improve the overall performance.
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