We currently run HP DL585's AMD host servers but found out our DR site will be providing us Intel based server (make/model I am not sure of). They are responsible for installing ESX.
Would my Windows 2000/2003 guests care the hosts are now Intel (ignoring VMotion since I had to use CPU masking to get some vmotioning to work in my current environment)?
Thanks in advance!
Nope, they would not care.
Beauty and portability of virtualization.
Thank you.
Windows VMs normally don't have a problem with the CPU change.
An exception are application which utilize special CPU features - those apps are rare.
With Linux you will probably run into problems.
Why so? I would have thought that the linux guest would only see the VM hardware. Not trying to catch you out here Oliver, but I am interested in an explaination as Linux/*NIX is not my stong point.
This thread is a bit old but discusses it: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=27396
See also the guest OS install instructions
Think it may depend on what linux kernel you have. If you have one compiled specific for AMD you will have a problem and would need to switch to an i386 kernel.
I had that problem where I had a linux VM installed on an opteron host and then moved it to an Intel host and had to switch kernels for it to boot properly.
As petedr already said.
And the newer the distro the more likely a spezial kernel gets installed.
With 64bit VMs this is even worse.