“ESX/vSphere CPU compatibility with vMotion (EVC)”
If you dont know what EVC is will you are eventually going to find out. This feature is required for vMotion to be used in an environment with a mixture of CPU. For the Past few years I had all my ESX server using CPU’s in the same family but recently got a great deal on a new dell server with i7 core. To enable this server for vmotion without any downtime I had to do the following.
Environment:
Existing – 3 HP DL380 G5 servers with X5450 processors
New – 1 Dell Power Edge R710 server with E5520 processors (i7)
Check the EVC doc to find what to use.
VMware KB 1003212
First you need to create a (new) cluster. You can go into the setting and enable the EVC setting. Use the KB doc from above to determine which mode to use. In my case I went with : “Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2″. DO NOT try to change any existing clusters.
Now you need to move an Host to the cluster. Drag and drop is the easiest. The host most have all guests shut down or just be empty. Because I am using a new server mine was empty.
Once you have the cluster up and a host in it you are now able to vMotion guests from out side the cluster to it. I took all the guests from one host not in the cluster and moved them to the new host in the cluster. Once that host was empty I then moved the host to the cluster. Now just do that for the rest of your guests and hosts until all your hosts are in the EVC enabled cluster.
If an error occurs when trying to move the host to the cluster check the BIOS CPU features of the server to verify that the VM features are enabled and the no execution is enabled.
For a good explanation of what EVC is (in plain english) READ THIS from the VMguy blog
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