is vMotion working between HP DL380 G7 and Gen9

[PRIMAVERALIFE]

Hi All,

I would like to find out how vMotion is working between HP DL380 G7 and HP DL380 Gen9?

Can someone help me?

vMotion between this two Servers:

HP DL380 G7:

Intel Xeon E5649

Embedded 4x1GbE Network Adapter

+NC364T PCI Express QuadPort Gigabit

HP DL380 Gen9:

Intel Xeon E5-2650v3

Embedded 4x1GbE Network Adapter

+HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2-port 533FLR-T 10GBASE-T

Can someone help me?

I would be very thankful

Ralf

[MKguy · Accepted solution]

The G7 has a Westmere generation CPU, the Gen9 has a Haswell generation CPU.

vMotion requires you have the same subset of common CPU instruction sets and features on source and destination CPU and enabled in the server's BIOS.

That means in your case:

You will be able to vMotion a VM that was powered-on on the G7 host (VM is running with Westmere instructions) to the Gen9 and back as well (but only if you haven't re-power cycled the VM on the G9 host).

But you will not be able to vMotion a VM that was powered-on on the Gen9 host  (VM is running with Haswell instructions) to the older G7 host since it lacks these newer CPU instruction sets.

This is where EVC comes in. By enabling EVC on the cluster with the lowest common CPU generation (in your case Westmere), all hosts will present only these instruction sets to VMs when they're powered-on, which makes live migration possible across different physical CPU generations.

See these articles for details on EVC:

VMware KB: Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support

VMware KB: EVC and CPU Compatibility FAQ

Alternatively you could also manually mask CPU instructions per-VM with advanced settings if you don't have source and destination host in the same cluster, but it's a tedious task and I wouldn't recommend it.

[PRIMAVERALIFE]

Thank you very much for the explanation!

Meanwhile, I also found the EVC.

But I found no evidence of the required licensing for EVC.

Is VMware Standard enough or I need the Enterprise Version?

Thank you again and have a nice weekend...

Ralf

[MKguy]

EVC is available for all licensed versions that include vMotion, so, it's available for Standard license as well.