Can guests built on AMD hosts be recovered to Intel hosts?

[mv5134]

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!

[waynegrow · Accepted solution]

Nope, they would not care.

Beauty and portability of virtualization.

[mv5134]

Thank you.

[oreeh]

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.

[TomHowarth]

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.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

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

http://pubs.vmware.com/guestnotes/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=guestnotes&file=gues...

[petedr]

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.

[oreeh]

As petedr already said.

And the newer the distro the more likely a spezial kernel gets installed.

With 64bit VMs this is even worse.