Compatibility CPU and ESXi 5.1 U3, 5.5, 6.0

[hejbi]

Hello guys,

basically I have quite simple question and I would like to have a confirmation from your site, because in my oppinion vendor is wrong in some their statements.

- I am currently running ESXi 5.1 U3. I need to replace my old HP blade servers (CPU Xeon X5550) with new ones.

- In the future I need to run ESXi 6.0.

- Server vendor offered me the blade servers with the following CPUs: Xeon E5-2620v4, Xeon E5-2680v4, Xeon E5-2630v3, Xeon E5-2695v3.

Questions:

a) Is any of these CPU compatible with ESXi 5.1 U3 and ESXi 6.0 as well? I would like to add new blade servers into vSphere 5.1 cluster and then do the upgrade of hypervisor from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 6.0.

b) Is any of the CPUs Xeon E5-2620v4, Xeon E5-2680v4, Xeon E5-2630v3, Xeon E5-2695v3 compatible with vSphere 5.1 U3?

Thanks a lot for your any ideas.

Hejbi

[suhag79]

Hi,

Did you tried this ?

VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search

[rcporto]

a) Is any of these CPU compatible with ESXi 5.1 U3 and ESXi 6.0 as well? I would like to add new blade servers into vSphere 5.1 cluster and then do the upgrade of hypervisor from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 6.0.

My recommendation will be upgrade your vCenter first to version 6.0, add the new hosts with ESXi 6.0 installed to the same vCenter of your ESXi 5.1 hosts and migrate the virtual machines. Adding the new hosts with ESXi 5.1 to upgrade them later to version 6 will just increase the administrative effort.

b) Is any of the CPUs Xeon E5-2620v4, Xeon E5-2680v4, Xeon E5-2630v3, Xeon E5-2695v3 compatible with vSphere 5.1 U3?

Like I said on my previous answer, install ESXi 6.0 directly on these new hosts, anyway, if you need validate compatibility of the new hosts with the vSphere 5.1 U3, provide at least the vendor and model of the new servers instead of just the CPU model.

[hejbi]

Hi Suhag79,

thanks for your answer. Yes, I tried that and based on results from this compatibility matrix I think that neither of CPUs Xeon E5-2620v4, Xeon E5-2680v4, Xeon E5-2630v3, Xeon E5-2695v3 are compatible with vSphere 5.1 U3. But I have received reply from Hewlett Packard (HP) that at least CPUs Xeon E5-2630v3, Xeon E5-2695v3 supports vSphere 5.1. So I wanted to be really sure and have confirmation also from other experienced guys, like you. I simply think that HP is wrong.

[hejbi]

Hello Richardson,

thanks a lot for your reply, I very appreciate your comments. Basically what you propose is the correct way and I fully agree. But there is a complication, primary goal is to increase a performance of current vSphere 5.1 cluster (running on old HP blades) as soon as possible. But we have to at first resolve inter-compatibility between VMware products which we are using now (SRM 5.1, Horizon), prepare detailed plan for upgrade from vSphere 5.1 to 6.0 and for Horizon, SRM as well, everything with minimal downtime. Without proper plan and with good time budget it is difficult to do it in my opinion. So one quick solution was try to find some CPUs which supports vSphere 5.1 U3 and vSphere 6.0. To support vSphere 6.0 is because in the future there is definitely a plan to upgrade all VMware products (vSphere, SRM, VDI) to 6.0, so it doesn't make sense now to buy old blade servers supporting only vSphere 5.1 and through it away after upgrade to vSphere 6.0. Thank you, Hejbi

[hejbi]

I will provide blade server types tomorrow, but in my opinion there is keypoint CPU type in this case.

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

I really believe that the CPU will not be an issue, just go ahead.

And if you look at the following URL you will see some referent to ESXi 5.1 U3 and Xeon 2600-v3 Series: VMware Compatibility Guide - cpu

But again, I believe that CPU will not be a problem, and the fact you can't found that CPU on HCL for version 5.1 U3 is maybe due the fact that these CPU are newer than the ESXi 5.1 U3 release and so any vendor wasted time for check compatibility for an older ESXi version.

Note that when looking for ESXi hardware requirements, you will found:

64-bit Processor

• ESXi 5.1 will install and run only on servers with 64-bit x86 CPUs.
• ESXi 5.1 requires a host machine with at least two cores.
• ESXi 5.1 supports only LAHF and SAHF CPU instructions.
• ESXi 5.1 requires the NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in the BIOS.
• ESXi 5.1 supports a broad range of x64 multicore processors. For a complete list of supported processors, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

RAM

• 2GB RAM minimum
• Provide at least 8GB of RAM to take full advantage of ESXi 5.1 features and run virtual machines in typical production environments.

Hardware Virtualization Support

• To support 64-bit virtual machines, support for hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD RVI) must be enabled on x64 CPUs.
• To determine whether your server has 64-bit VMware support, download the CPU Identification Utility from vmware.com.

And I am pretty sure that these newer CPU includes all these requirements.

[impranayk]

Check this Compatibility Guide.

VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search