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eugenesnowball
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VMware EVC - New host in vCenter 5.1 not in EVC generation options

We installed a new host on our infrastructure. The specifications of the other hosts are as follow:

Super Micro

X8DTT

Intel Xeon CPU

E5620 @2.4Ghz

Super Micro

X8DTT

Intel Xeon CPU

E5606 @2.13Ghz

Super Micro

X8DTT

Intel Xeon CPU

E5645 @2.4Ghz

Intel Core i7

950 @3.07Ghz

The new host's specifications look like this:

Dell PowerEdge R900

Intel Xeon CPU

X7350 @2.93Ghz

After the new host was installed, I was not able to migrate a VM from another host.

The virtual machine requires hardware features that are unsupported or disabled on the target host

*SSE4.1

*SSE4.2

We can see this processor belongs to the Tigerton generation. However, EVC does not have Tigerton listed under the generations.

My questions are the following:

1. Can a generation on EVC mess with our current infrastructure and affect our VM's?

2. Which generation will work for Tigerton? And if it does not work, what are the risks for my other VM's?

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RyanH84
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Hi,

As per this blog post

You will need to use the Merom baseline for Intel CPU, because the CPU is of a very old architecture.

1) I'd imagine that you are currently running at a higher level of CPU architecture than this. Given that the error you are seeing is that the VM is utilising a newer CPU instruction set (SEE4) available on the host CPU but is not available on the Tigerton CPU. To set the baseline you would have to effectively power off all VM's and set the baseline to the lowest (Merom). As they would be getting a "downgrade" across the board in terms of CPU features. Some applications are specifically sensitive to what is exposed to them, so you might want to do some homework on that. Typically, I'd use EVC if I had bought newer hosts with newer hardware and wanted them to conform to the existing older architecture as that just limits how they are exposed to the guest and will never use the newer features. You are thinking of going down a step, which is much more intrusive and could potentially impact your VM's.

2) You need the Merom baseline, please think about this hard for your environment before doing so!

Happy to help further



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Regards, Ryan vExpert, VCP5, VCAP5-DCA, MCITP, VCE-CIAE, NPP4 @vRyanH http://vRyan.co.uk

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RyanH84
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Hi,

As per this blog post

You will need to use the Merom baseline for Intel CPU, because the CPU is of a very old architecture.

1) I'd imagine that you are currently running at a higher level of CPU architecture than this. Given that the error you are seeing is that the VM is utilising a newer CPU instruction set (SEE4) available on the host CPU but is not available on the Tigerton CPU. To set the baseline you would have to effectively power off all VM's and set the baseline to the lowest (Merom). As they would be getting a "downgrade" across the board in terms of CPU features. Some applications are specifically sensitive to what is exposed to them, so you might want to do some homework on that. Typically, I'd use EVC if I had bought newer hosts with newer hardware and wanted them to conform to the existing older architecture as that just limits how they are exposed to the guest and will never use the newer features. You are thinking of going down a step, which is much more intrusive and could potentially impact your VM's.

2) You need the Merom baseline, please think about this hard for your environment before doing so!

Happy to help further



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Regards, Ryan vExpert, VCP5, VCAP5-DCA, MCITP, VCE-CIAE, NPP4 @vRyanH http://vRyan.co.uk
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