Jonathan Kehayias (3/15/2013)
The configuration you are trying to obtain doesn't make sense. With 4 NUMA nodes and 4 instances I would just use ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION and set the process affinity for each instance to a specific node. The theory behind reserving CPU 0 and 15 for the OS is good in theory, but not in the reality of how OS scheduling occurs or other process scheduling is going to occur. In all my time working with SQL Server I've only once had to reserve CPUs for the OS and it was for a separate application that was running on the server and it had it's own process affinity settings to make it run on those CPUs. You are over complicating things here for no real net gain other than you promised something that I wouldn't have recommended promising.
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Makes sense. 4 instances, 4 NUMA nodes, I'll give it a shot and see if that works on DEV while I'm researching a better solution long-term, be it virtualization, Windows System Resource Manager, or something else.
And I'll still check BIOS settings between the two boxes at my next maintenance window just to make sure.