AMD-V and ESX 3.5

[kennys0]

Hi Folks,

I've encountered an issue with using VC 2.5u2 VMotion migration of a Solaris 10u5 64-bit guest between two HP BL685c G5 servers running ESX 3.5u2. If AMD-V is enabled in the BIOS the Solaris kernel panics on VMotion migration. I've raised a call with HP as the H/W and S/W supplier to try and find the answer to this question but I thought I would post here to see if anyone knew the answer already.

Clearly unlike Intel-VT, AMD-V is not required to run 64-bit guests. However, I cannot find any information as to whether it provides any performance benefit with ESX 3.5u2 or any recommendation as to whether it should be enabled or disabled.

To encourage you to help I'm posting a document on the steps I had to take to fix a cold cloned Solaris VM

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kenny

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Are both configured with AMD-V enabled? If so then this should not happen, but if they are not both configured identically this could happen. Remember that AMD-V changes the instruction set and therefore the CPU. To VMotion 64bit VMs the CPU/Instruction sets must be identical. I would either configure both to have AMD-V enabled or both not to have AMD-V enabled.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[kennys0]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for the response, I was aware of the CPU type VMotion migration considerations and have limited my testing to having both machines with identical BIOS configurations. I'm currently trying to dig out another 64-bit Solaris x86 release to see if the issue is limited to the Solaris 10u5 release and will let you know how that goes.

Kenny