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Marco
Asked: 2024-10-03 17:22:09 +0800 CST

vSphere cluster EVC mode for Intel Coffee Lake + Raptor Lake based hosts

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I'm working on the migration of an existing 2 hosts vSphere 6.7 cluster to a new 8.0 vCenter Server Appliance. Both cluster's vSphere and ESXi hosts are at the latest available version.

New cluster: vSphere 8.0.3.00200 (Build: 24262322)

New host: ESXi, 8.0.3, 24280767

Old cluster: vSphere 6.7.0.55000 (Build: 22509723)

Old hosts: ESXi, 6.7.0, 20497097

In order to accomplish this task I bought a new Raptor Lake based (Xeon E-2468) host. The old hosts are identical, both Coffee Lake (Xeon E-2146G).

I'm unable to find an EVC compatibility that matches both type of hosts. Coffee Lake hosts are admitted succesfully into the Broadwell generation enabled cluster, but when I try to add the newer host I get an error stating:

The host's CPU hardware does not support the cluster's current Enhanced vMotion Compatibility mode. The host CPU lacks features required by that mode.

host unable to join EVC enabled cluster

I expected only older processor would lack features available to newer ones, but it doesn't look like so. The older Broadwell Generation mode requires some features that the newer Raptor Lake E-2468 is apparently lacking.

I've found very few literature about this issue, including in Broadcom's KB, where surprisingly "Coffee Lake" Architecture isn't even mentioned. Also I'm unable to ask for VMware support because the 6.7 support contract is well gone, and the 8.0 vSphere is still in evaluation.

I'm about to give up on using EVC mode because I can't get it to work with this combination of hosts, so I'm asking here just to make sure I'm not missing anything important for the configuration. The older hosts will be decommissioned in any case, but since this will happen in 6-9 months, I didn't want to give up on EVC if possible.

Relevant note: all three hosts are Dell Enterprise hardware, R340 and R360.

vmware-vsphere

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    After a lot of research, thinking and effort I have been able to resolve the issue.

    First of all, the correct EVC mode for the Coffee Lake + Raptor Lake hosts combination in the vSphere cluster is Haswell.

    Secondly, in order to solve the issue I needed to understand that the sequence of my actions was crucial for the success of this operation, and it was very tricky to get over it, since the VCA in this setup is virtual and running on the cluster itself.

    • In order to solve the issue, I emptied one of the two hosts in the 6.7 cluster and upgraded to 8.0, installing via USB key.
    • Then I created the cluster on the new VCA, that was running on the newer host, and enabled EVC mode with the Haswell setting.
    • Then, I've added the first older Coffee Lake host in the newly created cluster.
    • Then I've had to shutdown the VCA on the newer host, unregister it, and register it on the older host that was already in the cluster. Then I started the VCA again.
    • At this point, with the newer host with no virtual machines on it, I was able to add it to the Haswell EVC cluster straight away.

    The message The host's CPU hardware does not support the cluster's current Enhanced vMotion Compatibility mode. The host CPU lacks features required by that mode. confused me. I'm not an english native language, but it sounds bad written. What it actually means is that there are virtual machines running on the host that are using CPU features not available on the destination cluster, not that the hardware CPU is actually lacking those features.

    EVC mode for Coffee Lake and Raptor Lake mixed hosts

    Of course once the older hosts will be decommissioned, I will be able to switch to the newest EVC mode for Raptor Lake CPUs and all the hardware features of the newer CPUs will be available to the virtual machines.

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