VMotion from Intel to AMD CPU - How to Mask?

[Marc_P]

Hi,

I want to set the CPU Mask to allow VMotion from our Intel ESX Hosts to a AMD ESX Host.

I get the following error when trying to VMotion from Intel CPU to AMD CPU:

"Unable to migrate from vmsvr3 to vmsvr5: Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine's requirements at CPUID level 0x80000001 register 'ECX'

Host bits: 0000:0000:0000:0000:0011:0111:1111:1111

Required: 0000:0000:0000:0000:00XX:0XX0:000X:XXXX

I'm unsure what to set the CPU mask as. Any pointers?

Thanks

[dvd76]

VMotion as well hot migrate between Intel and AMD is not possible, you can only do a cold migrate.

Further more when doing a cold migrate as the guest OS sees a representation of the physical CPU it will see a whole different CPU family when migrating from an Intel to AMD CPU or the othe way around. The guest OS must be capable to deal with this kind of hardware changes. Windows 2003/2008 will not be a problem, Linux might be in some cases..

I am not shure if it is still the case for Linux but in the past when you did a cold migrate from AMD to Intel and you did the Linux Install on AMD you got a kernel panic on Intel. The other direction worked fine. Problem was with the microcode installed for CPU enhancements, the AMD one caused a kernel panic on load, the Intel one just failed to load and Linux started.

[java_cat33]

Hi - as the other poster advised - it is not possible to vmotion between Intel and AMD.

[weinstein5]

I will add my voice to the chorus - vmotioning between different CPU manafacturers is currently not possible. The manufacturers do understand that is an issue and are working to fix this as more of the world becomes virtualized.

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

[ksc]

You basically have to mask out everything to get an Intel/AMD VMotion to work.

If this seems like a bad idea ... well, it is. Nobody would ever run something like that in production, or even for anything except experimentation or research. If you have manually compiled all code running in the VM to use nothing more complex than a Pentium (the late 90s chip, the one before Pentium II) instruction set then you can probably get a crash-free VM - but like I said, it's only of interest for experimentation.