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VSphere 6.5 And VNUMA

David Klee notes that vSphere 6.5 might modify vNUMA settings on you:

I appreciate their attempt to improve performance, but this presents a challenge for performance-oriented DBAs in many ways. It now changes expected behavior from the basic configuration without prompting or notifying the administrators in any way that this is happening. It also means that if I have a host cluster with a mixed server CPU topology, I could now have NUMA misalignments if a VM vMotions to another physical server that contains a different CPU configuration, which is sure to cause a performance problem.

Worse yet is that if I were to restart this VM on this new host, the hypervisor could automatically change the vNUMA configuration at boot time based on the new host hardware.

I now have a change in vNUMA inside SQL Server. My MaxDOP settings could now be wrong. I now have a change in expected query behavior. 

Definitely read the whole thing if you’re using vmWare.