A host with powered on or suspended virtual machines cannot enter an Enhanced VMotion Compatibility cluster that is configured for a lower CPU feature baseline than the host's.

[Blackhawkup]

Apologies for previous format...take 2:

We are receiving an Error when attempting to join ESX Host 4 to an ‘EVC enabled’ Vsphere cluster (with different Host CPU specs):

A host with powered on or suspended virtual machines cannot enter an Enhanced VMotion Compatibility cluster that is configured for a lower CPU feature baseline than the host's.

ESX Host 1-3

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz

ESX Host 4

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5530 @ 2.40GHz

EVC Config on VCenter Server

VmWare EVC Mode: Intel(R) Xeon(R) 45nm Core 2

Applies the baseline feature set of Intel® Xeon® 45nm Core™2 ("Penryn") processors to all hosts in the cluster.

Hosts with the following processor types will be permitted to enter the cluster:

Intel® Xeon® 45nm Core™2 ("Penryn")

Intel® Xeon® Core™ i7 ("Nehalem")

Intel® Xeon® 32nm Core™ i7 ("Westmere")

Compared to the Intel® Xeon® Core™2 EVC mode, this EVC mode exposes additional CPU features including SSE4.1.

For more information, see Knowledge Base article 1003212.

VMWare VCenter Version: 4.0.0 Build 208111

(NB. VCenter running outside of cluster on physical machine.)

Can you help advise what action to take?

If possible we’d like to avoid powering down these machines.

Is it possible simply to create a temporary ‘EVC disabled’ cluster in VCenter and move the VMs on ESX Host 4 to the other hosts in the cluster, and then join it to the cluster, or do we need to additionally alter EVC settings for the cluster?

Thanks..

[AntonVZhbankov]

You have to power these VMs off anyway if you want them to run in that EVC cluster.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Blackhawkup]

Thanks very much for your reply..

So powering off VMs is the only requirement - no change to EVC settings?

[AntonVZhbankov]

>So powering off VMs is the only requirement - no change to EVC settings?

What EVC do - it hides advanced CPU features for VMs that are not supported by older hosts in cluster. VMs on new host already know about these features, so EVC can't hide it on-the-fly. So you power off VMs, EVC reconfigures them and after startup these VMs will see slightly different CPU, without SSE 4.1.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Blackhawkup]

Thanks Anton,

So to confirm, there's no way of doing this without powering down all the VMs on ESX04?

[AntonVZhbankov]

Yes.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[Blackhawkup]

thanks for your help..

[AntonVZhbankov]

If you consider any comment as helpful please award points

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru