While vSphere 7.0.2 and later supports up to 896 CPU threads (PCPUs) per physical host and up to 768 vCPUs per VM, the maximum number of vCPUs per virtual socket (cpuid.coresPerSocket) is 64 . In the case of a CPU with more than 32 cores, for example a 40 core Intel Ice Lake CPUs with HyperThreading / SMT enabled, a VM might not be able to accurately represent the underlying physical cores per socket topology. 

For 1 socket systems, any virtual machine with more than 64 vCPUs, or 128 vCPU on a 2 socket system, would need to divide the amount of PCPU (threads) per socket by 2 for the value of coresPerSocket.

As of today, there are no known issues with SAP HANA for socket configurations that are half the size of their respective virtual NUMA node core size on 32+ core CPUs. In case a customer is experiencing SAP HANA related issues with 4 virtual sockets and 2 virtual NUMA nodes, the customer is advised to open an SAP VMware support ticket and reference this KB. 

For more information, please refer to the SAP HANA vSphere Best Practices guide.

The following VMware SAP support component is available for escalating VMware SAP on vSphere issues:
•    BC-OP-LNX-ESX (Linux on VMware ESX and SAP HANA)

Note: The maximum number cores per socket was increased with ESXi 8.0 and virtual hardware version 20.

Maximum configurable Cores Per Socket on ESXi (89879)

Hardware Features Available with Virtual Machine Compatibility Settings (VMware Docs)