EVC enable

[fborges555]

Hi gurus

I have an existing cluster the has EVC disable, I have some gen9 and I am adding some Gen10 HP server, I think I have "Ivy bridge" for both compatibility

do I have to turn off machines in order to enable EVC? or can I just enable without having issues?

Thanks for the help and time

[scott28tt]

Enable EVC on an Existing Cluster

[a_p_]

The E2600-v3 series CPUs are Intel "Haswell" Generation.

Simply try to set the EVC mode. It will either let you enable it, or show you an error. Powered on VMs will not be affected from enabling EVC.

As mentioned in the documentation that's mentioned before, you may need to power off VMs if they use features that are not supported by the selected EVC mode. This can unfortunately be also the case with the correct EVC mode, and is related to Intel's microcode updates which introduced additional features.

André

[fborges555]

Hi

Thanks for jumping in gurus, is there a place where I can check/see what features are the VM using? if they are ok by snady I will go with sandy, so I dont have to shutdown prod VMs.

Thanks  all

[scott28tt]

Moderator: Moved to vSphere (question not specific to a vCenter Server issue)

[MJMSRI]

Before adding the Gen10 Hosts to the cluster, select Enable EVC from the cluster then select the desired Intel EVC Level, this will pre-check against the hosts and advise which is and isnt compatible, you can then see which level can be set and if they are all Gen9 hosts they will be using just the features available from the host CPU.

If you added Gen10 hosts into Gen9 cluster and then wanted to enable EVC this is more complex as then some machines could be using the newer gen10 cpu features in which case VM's powered off would be safest as the EVC mode set would need to be aligned to the lowest CPU feature set which would be the Gen9's. So all of the newer features in the Gen10 cpu would be masked.

[fborges555]

MJ.

Thanks a bunch, I am going to ask you this,  I am going to retired the gen9 and only leave this Gen10 on this cluster, should I wait for this to happen and migrate all vm to Gen10 so I can enable EVC without turn VMs off?

Thanks

[MJMSRI]

With that plan i would configure a new Cluster in vCenter for the Gen10 Hosts, when you create the new cluster, add all the Gen10 hosts then before any VM's are on the cluster, enable EVC and set to highest available setting for Intel. Then also setup HA, DRS etc to best practice. Then when you have time you can vMotion VM's from the Gen9 Cluster to Gen10 Cluster. Once complete the hosts in Gen9 cluster can be decommissioned and that cluster removed.

[fborges555]

MJ

But the Gen9 and Gen10 are already in the same cluster, so the best way to do this without turning VMs

1) create a new cluster

2) Put Gen10 in Maintenance mode so I can get all VMs out them

3) Move gen10 to the new cluster

4) enable EVC/DRS/HA on the new cluster

5) start Migrating VMs from GEN9 to GEN10

what about GEN9 VMs that will move to GEN10 which is more advance, will this machine need to be turn off? do to the fact that we are going to a higher CPU or due to the fact that EVC is not enable at this moment on the current cluster Need no VMs to be turn off while migrating to the new GEN10 cluster

Hope I made sense

[fborges555]

MJ.

Any last thought on my last post???