The 690's support EVC, but the 6850, to my disappointment, does not. In the meantime, I was trying different combinations with the level 1 eax, ecx, and edx masks, and got one to work, BUT only for Windows XP/2003 guests. My 2008 servers take 10x longer to boot, and then there are problems with system devices not having resources. So I am still stuck there.

When you vmotion a vm, the message will tell you what the required mask should be, but when I try that, it doesn't work. Does anyone know if you should be able to determine the mask by the vmotion error dialogue?

BTW, the link you posted is broken, but I have seen that document before.

Attached is a screenshot of the masks that allow XP/2003 guest to vmotion.

Andre, I'm just getting back to this now. Your suggestion for disabling the nx bit worked for my 2008 64bit guests, but it is still a problem for the 32bit 2008 guests. Do you have any other suggestions?

Okay, thanks very much for your help. I will see if any more tinkering with cpuid masks help, and will post the results here.

I actually used the CPUID ISO, and derived the mask as shown in my initial post. It looks like the link you posted has an updated version from the one I used. Maybe I'll try that and see if there are any differences. Maybe I should also ask if you know of a way to enable EVC on the Dell 6850? It isn't that old of a server, so it should seem it would support this.

thanks, Jack

Yes, the 6850 has Intel VT, it runs both 32 and 64 bit guests fine, and remember checking for vt in the bios. Maybe I have done something wrong trying to configure EVC? I just checked the settings in vsphere client, and see something interesting. It reports an incompatible cpu for the 6850, but now it also reports one of my Precision 690's as also having an incompatible cpu. The other 690 seems fine. I think the two 690's are identical in bios settings, etc, so I'm not sure how to proceed with this. Any ideas?

Yes, both are the same. As far as I can tell both are identical, except for the amount of RAM. One has 20GB, but the other only has 4GB (haven't upgraded it yet), and that is the one that is not EVC compatible.