EVC Issue

[athurston]

Hi All,

Since migrating to 5.1 from 4.1 we have been having issues enabling EVC, this had been working in the previous 4.1 environment but now when trying to enable EVC we get the following error,

The host cannot be admitted to the cluster's current Enhanced vMotion Compatibility mode. Powered-on or suspended virtual machines on the host may be using CPU features hidden by that mode. (We get this message for each of the hosts that we have upgraded)

Is there any way to identify what is preventing this being enabled?

Thanks

Alex

[MauroBonder]

In those hosts have vms powered on ? If yes, to enable EVC you must power off all vms.

[athurston · Accepted solution]

ok Thanks for your reply MB, this is currently our production network so we will be unable to power off all the VM's is there any other way we can acheive this? could we create a separate Cluster with this enabled and migrate everything across?

[MauroBonder]

Check - VMware vSphere 5.1

[weinstein5]

Not without powering off the VMs - remember EVC masks features of the physicals CPUs so if the VM is using this feature and migrates to a host that does not have it will cause issues to the running VMs -

[athurston]

Ok Thats fine i understand that but is there a way to see which vm's are using a feature set of the CPU that is higher than the EVC mode?

[athurston]

ok is there a way to find via powershell which virtual machines have the CPUID Mask set to Expose the NX/XD Flag to guest?

[weinstein5]

Actuallu all of them will have the CPUID mask applied - this is to allow them to be vmotioned to any host in the cluster with EVC enabled

[tkawika]

My Vcenter Server is a VM on the host that needs all the vm's shutdown.  Can you manage the Cluster from Vsphere Client not connecting to a Vcenter Server?  I might have a workaround, where I clone the Vcenter server, move the cloned VM to the host that doesn't need to be shutdown, then shutdown the Vcenter server and turn up the Cloned Vcenter server and Bob is your uncle?  Any thoughts?

[VirtuallyMikeB]

Hello,

No, you can't manage a vSphere Cluster without accessing vCenter.  But instead of cloning, can you not vMotion vCenter to another host?

- Mike

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Mike Brown

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[tkawika]

When I try to move using vMotion, I receive an error requesting a cluster using EVC.  My host machines are not the same.  Different CPU's.  Each host have the same number of Cores and memory, just different generation of Intel Procs.

[athurston]

Yes we had the same problem and needed to clone vcenter to a new cluster, make sure you enable evc at the required setting before you migrate any machines, hope it helps!

[Intel233]

I am having the same issue.  How can I turn off all my VM's since my Vcenter is a VM?  I shut everything else off (only thing running was Vcenter and SQL).