Best Practices When Deploying VMware vSphere on the HP ProLiant DL980 (updated October 2012)

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Figure 5: Enabling Memory Mirroring Using RBSU
However, with vSphere 4.1, unless ESX is aware that memory mirroring has been enabled, you will see the following
error message when you attempt to install or boot ESX:
The system has found a problem on your machine and cannot continue.
The BIOS reports that NUMA node 1 has no memory. This problem is either caused
by a bad BIOS or a very unbalanced distribution of memory modules.
Solutions for this error are described in the following two sub-sections.
Enabling memory mirroring before installation
If you enabled memory mirroring before installing ESX, follow these steps when the ESX installation menu displays:
1. Press F2 and add the following line to the boot options:
useNUMAInfo=false
2. The ESX installation process continues, using the new parameter. On completion, the system reboots. At the boot
menu, press a to modify the kernel argument, then add the following to the end of the grub append> line:
useNUMAInfo=false
3. Complete the boot process for ESX.
4. Connect to the newly-installed ESX Server using vSphere Client.
5. Go to Configuration Panel > Software Advanced Settings > VMkernel.
6. Uncheck the VMkernel.Boot.useNUMAInfo setting to disable Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).