Installation guide

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VMware ESX Server Administration Guide
Note: If you manually set CPU affinity by one of the preceding options, then ESX
Server automatically sets the virtual machine’s memory to be allocated on the same
NUMA node. If you want to disable this feature, you need to change the
NUMAAutoMemAffinity configuration option to 0 (zero). For more information
on changing this advanced option, see Changing Advanced Settings on page 219.
Associating Future Virtual Machine Memory Allocations with a NUMA Node
You can also improve performance by specifying that all future memory allocations
on a virtual machine use pages associated with a single NUMA node (manual memory
affinity). When the virtual machine uses “local” memory, the performance improves
on this virtual machine. (See Obtaining NUMA Statistics on page 418 to determine the
NUMA node number.)
Note: You should specify nodes to be used for future memory allocations only if you
have also specified CPU affinity. If you make manual changes only to the memory
affinity settings, automatic NUMA rebalancing will not work properly.
Do one of the following:
• VMware Management Interface — Associate a virtual machine to a single NUMA
node. Click Edit in the Memory Affinity section of the Memory page for the
virtual machine. Then click the appropriate choices next to the NUMA nodes.
Click OK.
See Managing Memory Resources from the Management Interface on page 410
for additional information.
• Virtual machine configuration file — Add the following:
sched.mem.affinity = <NUMA_node>
where <NUMA_node> is the number of a single NUMA node.
• procfs interface on the service console:
/proc/vmware/vm/<id>/mem/affinity
Write the number of the NUMA node.