Possible to enable EVC on some cluster but not all clusters

[JulienRick]

Hello,

I'm currently facing a strange issue with EVC in 2 different environments :

1. In my production I have several clusters and 2 clusters without EVC activated. (vcenter 6.0u3 + ESXi 6.0u3)

- On the first cluster 2x Dell M520 (max EVC mode Intel® "Ivy Bridge" Generation) running 4 VMs, I can change the EVC mode with running VMs to intel "Ivy bridge".

- On a second cluster 3x Dell M630 (mac EVC mode Intel® "Haswell" Generation) running more than 100 VMs I'm note able to set the EVC mode to Intel® "Haswell" like in the other cluster.

2. In my lab environment I'm able to enable and disable EVC on my 2 clusters with running VMs on it including the vCenter. (vCenter6.5 + ESXi 6.0u3)

Can someone explain why ?

[Finikiez]

Hi!

- On a second cluster 3x Dell M630 (mac EVC mode Intel® "Haswell" Generation) running more than 100 VMs I'm note able to set the EVC mode to Intel® "Haswell" like in the other cluster.

Are you sure that all hosts have identical CPUs and BIOS versions?

What's the error you get when you try to enable EVC on this cluster?

[JulienRick]

Hi!

All the 3 hosts in the cluster have an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 CPU and all hosts have BIOS version 2.4.2

Error Message for all the 3 hosts : The host cannot be admitted to the cluster's current Enhanced vMotion Compatibility mode. Powered-on or suspended virtual machines on the host may be using CPU features hidden by that mode.

[Finikiez]

Your CPU is from Broadwell family. See HCL VMware Compatibility Guide - cpu

So running VMs may use features which Haswell level doesn't support.

You have to power off VMs on hosts to enable EVC in Haswell mode.

[JulienRick · Accepted solution]

Solved! My CPus current EVC are not managed by a vCenter 6.0 u3 but only with vCenter 6.5.

I will be OK after a vcenter upgrade