SQL Server vCPUs and Performance
Community wiki answer:


  I'm really just wondering which might be the better configuration


On the low end workload spectrum, you probably won't notice a difference. On the higher workload spectrum I'd copy or come close to the underlying hardware setup.

Note that depending on the version of ESXi you use, having less than 8 vCPUs won't actually change the cores/node and you may have to edit the virtual machine config file to override the changes in default behaviour.



The output from the sys.dm_os_nodes query shows that VMWare overrode your config and gave you a single NUMA node.