Enable EVC in Essentials - possible or recommended?

[trg1]

Greetings! I'm planning on implementing VMWare Essentials in my environment, and I've run into a small issue with doing a suspended migration of a vm between 2 hosts. What I want to be able to do is suspend a vm, migrate it to to other host, then resume the vm. Unfortunately, one host CPU is a Xeon E5160, and the other is a Xeon E5420 - so it is not possible to migrate a running or suspended vm between these hosts (a SSE4.1 mismatch between these CPUs). Of course, migrating a stopped vm works fine.

So, based on what I've read so far, I should be able to enable EVC on these 2 hosts to allow this type of migration to occur. I think that in order to enable EVC I'll have to create a cluster to do this - I don't think that EVC is available on a host that is not part of a cluster. So, my questions are:

1) Is this true - is EVC only available to hosts that are part of a VMware cluster?

2) If so - is there any reason why I should not move my 2 hosts into a VMware cluster? Note that I do not intend on implementing HA, as I don't have a production-ready SAN available yet.

3) Can I implement a cluster in VMware Essentials? (Not the version of Essentials that includes HA.)

4) Will there be a significant performance degradation on the vm's hosted on the Xeon E5420 CPU due to not utilizing SSE4.1 on it?

Thanks for your time!

-Joe

[lnairn]

Hi, i will try to answer your questions,

1)EVC can only be configured in a cluster.

2)you can move your hosts into the cluster, there is no restriction about that. Probably you need to power off all the VMs in order to enable EVC (Depends on the hardware you are using)

3)you can implement a cluster, but you cannot enable DRS in the cluster because of licensing restriction.

4)I don't think that you will have any performance issue.

[AntonVZhbankov]

>1) Is this true - is EVC only available to hosts that are part of a VMware cluster?

EVC is available to cluster, you can not enable EVC for standalone hosts.

>2) If so - is there any reason why I should not move my 2 hosts into a VMware cluster? Note that I do not intend on implementing HA, as I don't have a production-ready SAN available yet.

No problems with such cluster.

>3) Can I implement a cluster in VMware Essentials? (Not the version of Essentials that includes HA.)

Yes.

>4) Will there be a significant performance degradation on the vm's hosted on the Xeon E5420 CPU due to not utilizing SSE4.1 on it?

No, unless you're using your VMs for scientific calculations or multimedia processing.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[trg1]

Anton, Inairn;

Thanks for the confirmation! Now, to move out on building this!

Thanks - Joe