Frank Denneman discusses VMware NUMA behavior when you hot-add more CPUs:
But what happens when the VM is configured with less vCPUs than the core count of the physical CPU package and CPU Hot-Add is enabled? Will there be performance impact? And the answer is no. The VPD configured for the VM fits inside a NUMA node, and thus the CPU scheduler and the NUMA scheduler optimizes memory operations. It’s all about memory locality. Let’s make use of some application workload test to determine the behavior of the VMkernel CPU scheduling.
For this test, I’ve installed DVD Store 3.0 and ran some test loads on the MS-SQL server. To determine the baseline, I’ve logged in the ESXi host via an SSH session and executed the command:
sched-stats -t numa-pnode. This command shows the CPU and memory configuration of each NUMA node in the system. This screenshot shows that the system is only running the ESXi operating system. Hardly any memory is consumed. TotalMem indicates the total amount of physical memory in the NUMA node in kb. FreeMem indicates the amount of free physical memory in the NUMA node in kb.
Interesting reading.