Dell r710 and PowerEdge 2950's - vMotion

[ndd822]

I have 2 PE 2950's with Xeon 5440's

We are about to order a Dell r710 with Xeon 5650's.

Will vMotion, HA, FT etc work fine? Right now I just installed a SAN and vmotion works between the PE's but I have not created a HA cluster yet. I wanted to check and see if the r710 will work?

Thanks!

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Forums - I believe it will be possible to have vMotion work if you were to set the approriate mask for the CPUs - you can automate by enabling EVC on a DRS cluster -

If you are only concerned about HA than you do not need to worry about vmotion since HA does not use require vmotion - you can place all these machines in HA a cluster because in HA if a host were to fail the VM would restart on another host -

FT I do not think is is possibe because the requirements around CPU compatability is much tighter

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[golddiggie]

The processors in the 2950's and R710's are not in the same categories shown in KB article 1008027... The 5600 series Xeon's are in the same category as the 5500 series Xeon's... This means FT won't work between the 2950's and R710.

Using EVC should allow you to use HA and DRS without too much trouble...

VMware VCP4

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[EVW]

These CPUs are in two different CPU groups, so you need to turn on the Enhanced Vmotion Compatibility (EVC) on your cluster when you want to use vMotion. The PE2950 and R710 need to run under the baselines of either Intel® Xeon® Core™2 or Intel® Xeon® 45nm

Core™2.

See also

[RParker]

There is some confusion in this thread.

EVC ensures compatibility across hosts in a cluster. That means you cannot even ADD machines that are not compatible, R710 and PE2950 are NOT compatible (as far as EVC is concerned).

You can STILL vmotion between just about ANY Intel Processor to any Intel Processor, you can't vMotion between AMD and Intel, that's the only place you will have a problem.

We have 2950, R900, R710, 6850 and IBM 3950. I can add ANY of these to ANY cluster (not EVC enabled) and vmotion doesn't even flinch. So I know that 2950 to R710 vMotion will work fine, but you can't enable EVC unless ALL the CPU are compatible (which basically means identical)

[notorious_bdg]

Vmotion will work fine, but you must enable EVC in Xeon 45nm Core 2 mode. If EVC is not enabled, VMs that power up on the R710's will not be able to vmotion to the 2950's, but VMs power up on the 2950's will be able to vmotion to the R710's. To prevent downtime enabling EVC, it's important that you enable EVC before adding the R710 to the cluster.

HA does not have any CPU compatibility constraints.

Fault Tolerance will not work between 2950's and R710's.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100321...

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100802...