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EVC with HasWell and BRoadwell

Hi All,
I have a cluster in which we have old and new servers. The cluster has five ESXi hosts. Two Esxi hosts are with latest CPU formerly Broadwell (L7) and other three are Haswell(L6). I have to enable Haswell to make both work. What is the best way to enable EVC on this cluster? Will it work if I power down all the VMs on L7 and enable L6 on the cluster? or I have to power down all the VMs and enable the EVC?

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

To enable EVC on a live production Cluster the baseline has to be enabled, and this can only be enabled if the VMs are not using the instructions of the CPU, so VMs using CPU instruction sets on the Broadwell (L7) will need to be powered off, because these will the instruction sets which will need to be masked.

Remember as well, that this is only for Powered On LIVE machines that vMotion will not work, if you power off a VM, it can be migrated.

So if you power all VMs off on the Hosts with Broadwell (L7), create and apply EVC Baseline, and then power on VMs.

The EVC baseline should have been applied before VMs were powered on, on these new servers really, when added to Cluster, with EVC Baseline already created.

sara2000

ASKER

Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

no problems

sara2000

ASKER

I have a problem of configuring EVC in the cluster. I would appreciate your advice.
The vCEnter is an appliance and it resides at Dell 730 "BroadWell server". I can not move this vcenter from that Esxi host to lower end Dell 730 which has "haswell" CPU. becuase of this, I am unable to bring the high-end server to maintenance mode to remove it from the cluster. if I power down the vCenter then I can not configure the EVC.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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