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CPU Affinity and vSphere HA

Duncan Epping · Jun 27, 2013 ·

On the VMware Community Forums someone asked today if CPU Affinity and vSphere HA worked in conjunction and if it was supported. To be fair I never tested this scenario, but I was certain it was supported and would work… Never hurts to  validate though before you answer a question like that. I connected to my lab and disabled a VM for DRS so I could enable CPU affinity. I pinned the CPUs down to core 0 and 1 as shown in the screenshot below:

cpu affinity

After pinning the vCPUs to a set of logical CPUs I powered on the VM. The result was, as expected, a “Protected” virtual machine as shown in the screenshot below.

HA protection

But would it get restarted if anything happened to the host? Yes it would, and I tested this of course. I switched the server off which was running this virtual machine and within a minute vSphere HA restarted the virtual machine on one of the other hosts in the cluster. So there you have it, CPU Affinity and vSphere HA work fine.

PS: Would I ever recommend using CPU Affinity? No I would not!

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BC-DR, Server 5.0, 5.1, ha, VMware, vSphere

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Comments

  1. Fred Peterson says

    27 June, 2013 at 20:35

    What if you have a core count descrepancy in your hosts? So you set an affinity of lets say core 8 and 9 because they’re hex cores, but the other host is only quad? You don’t have a core 8 and 9.

  2. Kulikov Nickolay says

    13 May, 2014 at 15:16

    From vSphere Resource Management (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-51-resource-management-guide.pdf)
    When you move a virtual machine from one host to another, affinity might no longer apply because the
    new host might have a different number of processors.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007) and the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive" and the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series.

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