ESXI HA - hosts with different CPUs

D

Deadringers

n00b
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
22
Hi,

planning to get a new esxi box for my home lab.

Currently I have an Xeon server and planning to get an i5 to play around with HA etc.

Just wondering how the VMs deal with the change of CPU?

Reason I ask is the VM is aware of the CPU it's running on so what happens when it starts running on a different CPU?


Thanks
 
You can mix and match same vendor processors in a cluster and retain vmotion functionality using EVC, this allows you to set a lowest common denominator of processor feature sets in which the processor with the newer instructions has them disabled giving it a common ground.

The setting is between nehalem, westmere, sandy bridge, ivybridge

This obviously wouldn't work mixing AMD and Intel hosts for vMotion, though HA might still work as VM's are restarted on surviving hosts (not vMotioned)

In your particular case it might work as the i5 technically still falls under one of the Intel families.

Do you know which family the Xeon / i5 are from?

PS. After enabling EVC all virtual machines will need to be powered off and on again in order to allow you to vMotion them unless the host they currently reside on is the lowest common denominator feature set.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top