DRS Vmotion over differing hardware

Joined
Mar 15, 2002
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Hey guys quick question.

From what I've seen having a cluster of Dell PE 2950 III and PE 1950s works just fine as long as they are all Xeon processors, right? When does architecture start to become an issue with VMware clusters? Xeons that are several years apart?

I'm trying to save money where I can. There are currently two 1950s and a 2950 being used as ESXi servers and we'd like to introduce a SAN into the environment and use the Dell servers in a HA cluster.
 
Yep..it's all about EVC. Stay within EVC support and you're fine though at some point you'll want to split up clusters or move older hardware to a secondary/DR site.
 
Thanks for the info on this.

Since in the past all the servers I've used in a cluster have been exact matching hardware I'm not up on all the hardware compatibilities. Since we have went over CPUs is there any other hardware that could raise concern? How about NICs? I think some are Broadcom and others are Intel. How does VMotion handle this?
 
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Thanks for the info on this.

Since in the past all the servers I've used in a cluster have been exact matching hardware I'm not up on all the hardware compatibilities. Since we have went over CPUs is there any other hardware that could raise concern? How about NICs? I think some are Broadcom and others are Intel. How does VMotion handle this?

vMotion doesn't care about NICs. That's low level ESX stuff. You can have different NICs, speeds, configurations, whatever. What matters is that you have a matching port-group on the other server that can send/receive on the same network as the source server.

About your differing CPUs on the cluster... You have to enable EVC on the whole cluster and if you do it after a cluster is built it takes a reboot of the VMs so plan accordingly.
 
vMotion doesn't care about NICs. That's low level ESX stuff. You can have different NICs, speeds, configurations, whatever. What matters is that you have a matching port-group on the other server that can send/receive on the same network as the source server.

About your differing CPUs on the cluster... You have to enable EVC on the whole cluster and if you do it after a cluster is built it takes a reboot of the VMs so plan accordingly.

Unless I'm mistaken I believe the VMs in the cluster must be shut down to enable EVC on the cluster. You can also create a new cluster with EVC enabled and disconnect the hosts then reconnect them into the new cluster.
 
Unless I'm mistaken I believe the VMs in the cluster must be shut down to enable EVC on the cluster. You can also create a new cluster with EVC enabled and disconnect the hosts then reconnect them into the new cluster.

Yeah...that's what I meant but you said it better. :)

When building a new cluster ALWAYS enable EVC.
 
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