I recently created a cluster with two identical machines, which worked great. Then, I added a newly purchased machine with a slightly newer version of the Xeon CPU (the new one has "SSE4.1", and the older ones don't).
The vmotion error pointed me to KB 1993, which showed how to mask that feature on a per-VM basis. This works fine.
But, what seems like the logical next step is to mask it for the whole server, or across the whole cluster, so all my existing VMs and any newly created VMs will automatically be able to vmotion. Basically, I'm willing to give up the SSE4.1, it's irrelevant to my VM functions, in order to make vmotion work more easily.
Can this be done? Any pointers as to how?
I do not believe it is possibel to set maasking at the cluster or host level - it is set at the vm level only
Thanks for the response. After some more searching, I thought I had a solution, but it appears to only apply to VirtualCenter 1.x:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=1993&sliceId=2#VC1xdefault
Can this be done with VirtualCenter 2.5, even if not officially supported?
After much back and forth with VMware support trying various formats in the vpxa.cfg file, I finally got this:
"In VirtualCenter 2.0.x, you can edit the vpxd.cfg to include the global masks. However, in VirtualCenter 2.5 and above this option is no longer available, you must set the CPU masks on each virtual machine. In VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 and above, we added support for Enhanced VMotion Compatibility(EVC). EVC masks are applied before per-virtual-machine masks and global VirtualCenter server masks. Both of your processors Intel 5345 and Intel 5410 is on the supported processor list for EVC."
Bummer. EVC is certainly a great solution, but required quite a bit of shuffling as I had to turn on VT "Virtualization Technology" in the BIOS to make the hosts EVC-able. Turning on EVC for a cluster requires all guest to be powered off, so I won't be able to take advantage of this until I can arrange for an outage for the 60 production VM guests running on this cluster.
Hello,
To Enable EVC you need to enable Intel-VT and NoExcuteBit in the BIOS. But if you have 'enough' hosts you should not need to shutdown VMs. But I would, I did when I enabled EVC. Theoretically you should be able to migrate a VM into an EVC cluster as long as the CPUs match on the ESX hosts. Hence the comment about if you have enough hosts of the proper type.
Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354
As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization
When you say "Enable EVC", is there a config step needed to enable this? I do have VT and No-Exec enabled in the BIOS, but I am not sure how/where I enable EVC.
Also, the thing I'm trying to mask is SSE4.1, which the VMware docs say is not supported for EVC ( apparently because they think apps might not respect the mask for this feature. But, there is no chance that this will be used by my VMs, so I would like to mask it if possible)
EVC is enabled per DRS cluster -
Click on a cluster, settings, there is a an entry for "VMware VC".
This is where you can disable, enable EVC for Intel or enable EVC for AMD, or see diagnostics about why you cannot enable it - incompatible hosts, plus the "EVC cannot be enable because not all virtual machines in the cluster are powered off" message that's keeping me from turning VC on.
- Christian
Hello,
You need to create a cluster within your datacenter using the VIC. Once you have a cluster you can drag systems into it, and then enable EVC. You can do this even if you do not have HA or DRS licenses.
Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
SearchVMware Blog: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/
Blue Gears Blogs - http://www.itworld.com/ and http://www.networkworld.com/community/haletky
As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization
