How to enable EVC with vcenter as vm (VCSA) ?

[DavideD]

Hello,

I'm working with my customer to move his vSphere infrastructure from old to new servers. environment is the follow:

actual vSphere cluster:

some E5-2640 Sandy Brigde cpu + some other X5650 Westmere cpu

vsphere release 5.0

New infrastructure:

all E5-2604v4 Broadwell cpu

vspher 6.0 U2

My action plan would be to add actual servers to a new vcenter and then vmotion all vm (about 70) to new server; then remove old server from cluster.

To do this is mandatory to enable EVC in new vcenter, but it is only possible whit all registered vm powered off. But the only vm in this cluster id the vcenter.

The question is how to enable EVC when vcenter is a virtual machine, that should be turned off, but Ican not turn it off ?

thanks in advance

Regards,

Davide

[npadmani]

How to enable EVC in vCenter Server (1013111) | VMware KB

that's the KB you want.

[MKguy]

To do this is mandatory to enable EVC in new vcenter,

It's actually not. A thing that many people seem to be not aware of is that you can vMotion from older CPU generations to newer ones just fine without EVC. And even back from the newer ones to the old hosts unless the VM has been power-cycled (and is running with the newer generation instructions). You can see which CPU compatibility mode a VM is running on in the GUI Client. As long as it's an older generation and all other general vMotion requirements are met, you'll be able to vMotion the VMs without EVC or any hacks.

You can leave the new cluster as-is or enable the latest EVC (Broadwell/Haswell) on it, add the old hosts to the new vCenter without adding them to the new cluster, since this is not required either, and then just vMotion the VMs from the old hosts to the new ones.

[DavideD]

Thank you for your help.

For now all activities are stopped because summer holydays, but when we came back, I try your solution.