Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge in the same VMware cluster

[CamiloOrozco]

Hi guys,

A company I'm consulting for has a server with Intel E5-2630 (sandybridge) processor and now they want to buy a new server with Intel E5-2650v2 (ivybridge) processor and they want to create a VMware cluster using both servers and a SAN for HA purposes. I've checked for the information on EVC but there are no references of compatibility between these two families of processors. Do you have any experience or additional info about the compatibility of these in the same cluster (for vMotion purposes)?

Thanks and regards,

Camilo

[macvirtual]

HI CamiloOrozco,

For the first step, I think we need to share what EVC aim for.

EVC, which stands Enhanced vMotion Compatibility is the feature that assures VMs running on a cluster utilize same type of "vCPU".

When you do vMotion from the server that has a certain type of CPU to the other server that has different type of CPU, the VM might crash if you don't configure EVC because of CPU instruction set compatibility. To simply say, EVC is the feature that make sure to leverage vMotion between different type of physical CPU.

As you mentioned,

> they want to create a VMware cluster using both servers and a SAN for HA purposes

Your client seems to create a new cluster with only new server. In such situation, you don't need to concern about CPU compatibility among those servers your client use.

If your client requires to add the new server to existent cluster, indeed you need to concern EVC things.

Hope to work my advice for you.

Best,

MAC

[virtualdive]

Hi Camilo,

Yes they both are supported as part of EVC mode. Please see the picture attached.

You can also take a look at the below link.

VMware Compatibility Guide: cpu