SQL Server Virtualization best practices - NUMA, HT, Cores vs Speed
The best thing you could do is read the VMWare guide "SQL Server on VMWare Best Practices Guide". This holds all the information you need. However...


Unless the instance is configured as a "wide VM", taking vCores from each socket, then you won't see 2 NUMA nodes. With Hyperthreading enabled, then you're only using the cores on one socket. (3.3.4 NUMA Consideration).
From the best practices guide: "VMware recommends setting the number of cores per socket to one when allocating virtual CPUs to VMs on the vSphere platform. That means that a VM that requires 8 CPUs will have 8 vCPUs with 1 core each." (3.3.5 Cores per Socket). Test this yourself though.
Where I'm working, the answer is "it depends". Some instances we leave it enabled, and some we don't. However... "VMware recommends enabling Hyper-threading in the BIOS so that ESXi can take advantage of this technology." (3.3.3 Hyper-threading)
If there are going to be no other instances on the host, then it's not as big a factor as if there's going to be more than one instance. It would be of benefit to have those allocated to separate sockets if you're looking to maximise performance. Unfortunately, you'd need to do quite a lot of testing and data capture to make an objective determination - I haven't found anything from VMWare specifically relating to this.


Go through the entire guide and read it: http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/solutions/sql-server-on-vmware-best-practices-guide.pdf.

Other considerations are checking power schemes, because these can throttle CPUs so low that you get very poor performance, even from the best CPUs you can afford.