Hi Guys,
We are planning to add new servers to our existing vSphere 5 environment. We have 3 BL680c G5 (Intel Xeon E7330 processor) and planning to add a few BL680cG7 (E7-4800 Westmere family). Will EVC allow me to vmotion between them? Any other things I need to know before doing EVC? Thanks!
check for the processor compatability for EVC, if yes then you can vmotion between two disimilar (but EVC supported) cpus.
Hi
You have to enable EVC baseline for intel processors called Intel® "Merom" Generation (see link below) both processors are compatibile with this baseline.
Remember to enable EVC BEFORE you add new servers into existing cluster
Hi Artur,
Thanks for the info. If I enable EVC before adding the new servers, then it will add perfectly fine without shutting down the VMs? As i am seeing some posts to create a new cluster and enable EVC and then slowly start to migrate the hosts to the new cluster.
Thanks for the info. If I enable EVC before adding the new servers, then it will add perfectly fine without shutting down the VMs?
you are welcome, hmm ... I'm always forgetting how I did that, (I have to do some test in my lab and document it) my answer is - you can test by yourself - it is a harmless operation. Enable EVC, add new host into existing cluster and try to make vMotion - the worst case scenario is you will get incompatibility error before migration starts. Let me know what's results. If you don't want to risk, I can do some test in my Lab and let you know.
Can you help test it? Since I'm still waiting for the new servers to arrive. Thanks again !
Hi
Sorry for getting to you back so late, I did testing, no outage for VM when you enable EVC before you add new server into cluster
http://vmwaremine.com/2012/06/12/how-to-deal-with-evc/
Artur