Comments on: How to enable EVC on ESX 3.5 with No Downtime

By: Twitted by sideshowtob

Twitted by sideshowtob — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:45:45 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by sideshowtob [...]

By: craig

craig — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:07:11 +0000

Hi Leigh, I understand the difficulty you may face which may result the solution we put in here does not work with the latest chip set, unless. This post had been quite some times before the nehalem from Intel had launched. Is your VM currently running on a ESX host with Intel Nehalem?

By: Leigh Geary

Leigh Geary — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:48:00 +0000

We came across this issue and the advice above but it doesn’t work because, as previous comments state, it still shows CPU mismatch when you try to VMotion the VM’s back.

My Advice? Create a new cluster with your new incompatible head or spare head (or create a spare head by moving VM’s off), then clone the machines one at a time, choosing to run the cloned VM’s in the new cluster. Once complete, boot the cloned machine WITHOUT ETHERNET, then switch it across by disabling ethernet on the old and quickly enable ethernet on the new. Although there may be a small lag doing this, it’s a million times better than all the down time turn VM’s off.

By: VMotion compatible for ESX 3.5 and vSphere 4 | Malaysia VMware Communities

VMotion compatible for ESX 3.5 and vSphere 4 | Malaysia VMware Communities — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:43:39 +0000

[...] I am able to get the ESX 3.5 to be manage by the latest vcenter. A vmotion from ESX 3.5 to vsphere 4 had been successes too, but the latest version of virtual machine which built from vsphere 4 might not compatible to vmotion back to the ESX 3.5 hosts. At the same time, if you have different processors chipset in the environment and require EVC to be turned on, it may be a little challenge to do so. You may want to ensure the EVC to be done with no down time. You may need to refer to my previous post about how to enable evc with no down time. [...]

By: craig

craig — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:32:48 +0000

you may want to check the version of CPU option you select to your EVC, could be something like core 2, core i7, 45nm and etc
hope this will be helpful for you.

By: jfk8680

jfk8680 — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:19:20 +0000

I’m facing the same problem as Kimono but with Intel E5450 CPU’s. Once I enable EVC in a temp. cluster and try to move virtual machines to the temp. cluster it gives me a CPU mismatch error.

By: craig

craig — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:44:50 +0000

Yes, is cause by the previous version of ESX. Most of the time, we did not reboot the VM when we upgrade the ESX, so you will have a VM never reboot for more than 60 days but your ESX which had been upgrade for twice.

By: Kimono

Kimono — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:27:50 +0000

They are both opteron. One is 585G2 the other is 585G5. The VMs cold migrated into the EVC cluster, I can vmotion out of this cluster into the non-evc cluster and back again. So it’s something to do with CPU masking on the VMs that are already running in the non EVC cluster, requiring the VMs to be shutdown first. The masks aren’t something we’ve enabled, I suspect it’s a result of a previous version of ESX.

By: craig

craig — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:17:55 +0000

You can also check on the link posted by superman for further understanding about EVC. Hope it will help your issues

By: craig

craig — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:15:00 +0000

Would like to check with you, the AMD processor for your ESX are come with AMD Opteron range?