by Jake McTigue
Non Uniform Memory Access or NUMA is becoming increasingly commonplace on the next generation of very powerful servers. This is nothing new in the AMD product line; Opteron is a NUMA architecture and the associated performance boost of the Opteron specification catapulted AMD ahead of curve in the mid 2000’s. Intel has been trying to catch up for quite some time and the latest generation of Intel Xeon Nehalem processors not only sport NUMA, but better Virtualization Assist (VT-x) as well.
What does this mean for virtualization applications on the latest VMware incarnation? Serious performance increases for NUMA equipped systems.

Before we start on getting the most out of your hot new Nehalem rig or that brand new HP DL585 Opteron equipped server, let’s overview what makes NUMA different. NUMA is the logical successor for Symmetric Multiprocessing. In Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP, there are multiple processors and cores tied to a single memory controller. Each processor has uniform or symmetric access to all of the available memory. Access to memory resources are limited, because all CPUs work on a common bus and there is a fixed amount of bandwidth available.

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