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Figuring Out Virtual Sockets And Cores

Denny Cherry looks at a few considerations regarding virtual sockets and cores for a VM running SQL Server:

Standard Edition

You wants 1×6 (one socket, 6 cores) because standard edition will only use the first 4 sockets in a server (up to 16 cores combined). There’s no getting around that.

From a NUMA perspective as long a vNUMA at the Hypervisor is disabled then it doesn’t matter as SQL Server standard edition isn’t NUMA aware (NUMA awareness is an Enterprise Edition feature).

Read on for a more nuanced answer when it comes to Enterprise Edition.