IBM Blade servers compatability with Vmotion

[jgagel]

I have a issue with IBM changing models on me we need to confirm that the following will work.

I have looked at the Vmware compatability matrix and can't find confirmation

Can one vmotion a VM from a HS21XM 7995J3M IBM HS21 XM Blade Server, Xeon Quad Core L5335 2.0Ghz

to a

7995G1M HS21 XM, Xeon Quad-Core E5405 80w 2.0GHz/1333MHz/12MB L2 ??

Would I need to use CPU masking ?

[homerjnick]

We use IBM Blade's and I have VMotioned between quite a few HS20's and HS21's XM models with varying CPU's/Cores and never had an issue yet!

But not sure about your specific models there.

[Erik_Bussink]

Take advantage of the new ESX 3.5.0 Update 2 feature named Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC). Create a small Cluster with one HS21XM with each processor, and enable EVC. At that point the VirtualCenter will create a CPUID Mask that is compatible between the two processor steppings (X5405 & L5335) and apply it to all the hosts in the Cluster. With EVC enabled VirtualCenter will not allow you to add a non CPUID compatible ESX host to the cluster, but on the otherside, the VirtualCenter will not require to do those extensive VMotion CPU compatibily checks against the ESX hosts, and VMotion will be faster.

In the attached screenshot you get to see the CPUID Mask that was created with EVC for 3 hosts. Two of them are using Xeon 3350 processors, while the last one is using a Xeon 5410.

[jgagel]

Thanks Erik

Below is some more info I found on this

For EVC to work the cluster needs to be configured with a supported baseline. You do not need to have FlexMigration enabled on all of the hosts (FlexMigration is the Intel enabler for EVC). In fact, only the newer hosts that are Penryn based have FlexMigration capability. Basically EVC for Intel processors supports 2 baselines - the older Merom CPU microarchitecture based baseline and the newer Penryn CPU microarchitecture based baseline.

In this case, since the 5335 processor is Merom based, you can configure your EVC cluster to have a Merom baseline and add the Penryn based 5405 to the cluster to be VMotion compatible. EVC will automatically apply the Merom baseline to the Penryn hosts so the user will not have to worry about any incompatibilities.

Please see the VI 2.5 Update 2 Basic Admin Guide on how to enable EVC, specifically, the steps and requirements are found starting on Page 238. The Guide can be downloaded from here: "

Regards

John