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:

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.

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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