ESXi 5.1 Clusters Mixing Hardware

EVC is a trade off, compromise .... so therefore something is traded....and that's performance....

EVC is designed to mix old and new hardware, and the vMotion issue goes away.....

BUT, in many Design Circles, and Design Meetings we now how, EVC is considered a last resort, and work around, or fudge, and many now believe ALL New Hardware should be Clustered together, so you can benefit from the new series of Intel or AMD CPUs.

e.g. if you introduce lets say Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge or Haswell architecture in your news servers, if you create a combined cluster using EVC with a Westmere EVC Baseline, you will LOSE ALL the new features of the current Intel Generation Chips!

and this will have an effect on the performance of VMs, and the new OS, because they will not be able to use the new features.

 So, right or wrong, depends on your application, but I think his thinking is OLD SCHOOL!

Over a beer, I think, that's an open debate, I would like to take part in....

some evidence and blogs here

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/06/enhanced-vmotion-compatibility-evc-affect-performance.html

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-EVC-Perf.pdf

http://www.derekseaman.com/2012/09/how-much-does-evc-mode-matter-and-which.html

(maybe you could email him these, and ask him to eat pie, if you are feelling smug!)

VMware advises against mixing dissimilar hardware (especially different CPUs, and absolutely not AMD/Intel mix), as it's bad practice when it comes to DRS, HA, FT, vMotion, etc. I suppose the "brand" like HP/Dell "might" not be an issue (if they had the same internal hardware specs/brands), although I would never do so personally. I do know you must have EVC (Enhanced vMotion Computability).

Also, I'd recommend getting off of 5.1, it has a lot of issues. I'd go to 5.5.

MORE INFO HERE:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005764


Let me know if you need more info. But in short, YOU are right to advise against it.

@nwembly Where is your reference to VMware advises against mixing dissimilar hardware!

When we have a VMware Hypervisor, ALL Virtual Hardware is the same!

It's - EVC is short for Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

which makes this "bad practice" compatible!

I don't believe 5.1 has any more issues than 5.5!

We are still running ESX 2.5.4 in Production! (with no issues and stable!)

Hi,
I used EVC for some customers who are mixing ESX with different CPUs in a cluster, and there was HA, DRS, VMotion working without issues.
But as stated by A.Hancock you will loose some CPU instructions from the newer CPU, aligning to the less performant CPU if I may say so.
EVC is the easier way VMware has implemented cpu masking (since vsphere 4 if I remember correctly), and it is easier, but as cpu masking you will loose some of the new cpu benefits.

Here is one of some VMware KB talking about CPU masking :
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1993

Well, Andrew Hancock, an ESX 2.5 still in production...! Also this is not really my rule, but sometimes when it works, we got nothing to change! A proof of VMware strength and stability.

Thanks for the great feed back everyone...
 
In short there is no issue in creating one cluster that has a mix of DEll, IBM and Cisoc hardware using EVC. you just take a slight performance hit.

My argument was that we can vmotion between clusters and keeping host in one cluster would allow use to isolate them in some way if we need to implement cluster wide settings..

Maybe I am way off base

Thanks ..... great feedback everyone