Enabling EVC on vCenter 6.7U3

So basically at present you've got...

4 servers (Intel Xeon Gold 5220) - Cascade Lake
1 server (Intel Xeon Gold 5120) - Skylake

To migrate VMs Live (vMotion) between all five servers will need an EVC baseline of Skylake.

Do you have VMs on all servers at present ?

Where is vCenter Server located ?

That article although dated 18 Oct 2018, is the correct procedure.

Your issue is you cannot apply an EVC baseline to a power-on VM.

I only have VMs on the 4 Gold 5220 servers. the Gold 5120 server is in MM currently. vCenter is in the same cluster on a local SSD on one of the Gold 5220 hosts.

If I create a new cluster and move all the servers to the new cluster I have several backup jobs pointing to that cluster which I think will break.

If moving a host to another cluster doesn’t break vSAN could I move the Gold 5120 to a new cluster, move the vcenter to that host, enable EVC on the current cluster and then move vcenter and the Gold 5120 host back to the current cluster? I know I will need to power down all my current VMs on the current cluster.

Hang on here, vSAN is currently enabled on the current cluster resource (as it's cluster specific!)

Will all those VMs run on a single host ?

is Gold 5120 server, going to take part in vSAN and have storage to contribute ?

Is this Production or Lab ?

Yes, we have a vSAN in the current cluster which is why I am concerned when reading the KB Article. It doesnt seem like it will be that easy.

Right now, the amount of VM's I have will not run on one host. However, I can power them all off if needed.

Yes, that KB does not take into account vSAN.

Okay, lets walk through this... if you can power down the 4 VMs, that's good... because that will allow the EVC baseline of Skylake to be created.

Is that 4 one of them vCenter Server ?

I have more than 4 VM's on this cluster. They are spread out across 4 physical hosts (Gold 5220 CPUS). Even though the new physical host that I want to add (Gold 5120) is currently in the same cluster, I have it in MM with nothing running on it. It is part of the vSAN though.

I can turn off all the VM's in that cluster, including the vCenter if needed.

From what I've read if I turn off the VMs I should be able to enable EVC but I guess because vCenter is also a VM and part of that cluster, it might not let me?

Also, the vCenter server is an appliance thats on the local SSD of one of physical hosts (Gold 5220).

Ok, excellent. I will be doing my maintenance tomorrow morning. I will report back once I do the changes. Thank you for all the info.

no problems

I was able to do this tonight. I enabled EVC using Skylake and I am able to vmotion between the servers. so far it’s all looking good. the only issue I had which was a strange one is that one of the templates I had on one of the 5220s was preventing the host from going into the EVC. I made it in to a VM and then migrated it to another host. didn’t work. then I migrated another template on the same host to another on and then back and it worked. I’m not sure why the template would cause that but so far everything is looking good. thanks again for all your help.

no problems