Will enable EVC cause downtime?

[hchuin]

Hi,

I have a customer running vsphere 4.1 using 3 units of ESXi hosts running on Intel X7460 (Penryn) processor in a DRS enabled cluster.

They are looking at adding 1 more host into the cluster.  The new host will be running on Intel X7540 (Nehalem) processor.

Since the new processor features new instruction set such as SSE 4.2, I have to enable EVC on the existing cluster before the new ESXi host will be able to join the cluster and vMotion VM to the new host.  The plan is:

1. enable EVC on the existing cluster using Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2 as baseline.

2. join the new ESXi host into the cluster.

my question is:

- Will there be any downtime when I enable EVC on the existing cluster?  Since all existing host are using the same processor (X7460) so there shouldn't be any downtime as all VM are running on the same instruction set, correct?

- is there any other setting I need to do to ensure VM can vMotion to the new host?

Regards

Benjamin Ho

[pauljawood]

Hi,

If there are already virtual machines on the cluster that EVC needs to be enabled on then the issue will be that the cluster needs to be evacuated or I think the virtual machines turned off. EVC cannot be enabled on a a cluster with active servers.

If the VC is a virtual machine then have a look at this link http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101311...

This should also be looked at to see if this helps http://communities.vmware.com/thread/201677 along with this link as well http://communities.vmware.com/message/1598106

I hope this helps you answer the question and if it does then please leave points.

[chcachca]

- There is no downtime when you enable EVC

- you must enable vmotion on a vmkernel port in Networking

  my advice is to use a dedicated vlan

[idle-jam]

although the tutorial is aged but the same rules applies.

http://malaysiavm.com/blog/how-to-enable-evc-on-esx-35/

[nkrishnan]

For enabling EVC you dont want to down the VMs but to add the host in EVC cluster you have to power off the VMs and add it

EVC cluster will not allow to add the host or enable the feature on the power on VMs host

Nithin