Everyone should all be aware of KB 1003212, and EVC has not changed over the years, but the acceptable terminology has changed over the last decade. One of the things I keep hearing questions about is can you do vMotion between processor families? Recently over the previous five years, Intel has started calling their processor’s generations, families like Skylake family or Haswell family.
Families for EVC don’t equal Intel Families. VMware EVC covers multiple brands of microprocessors both Intel and AMD, for EVC family equals either Intel or AMD. You can not do a vMotion between Intel Family and AMD Family you can vMotion with correct EVC configuration between Skylake, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, ETC, referred to generations of Intel chipsets.
The extra twist is with spectre meltdown if you have patch your hosts to 5.5, 6.0 hosts for spectre meltdown and you’re trying to do vMotion to 6.5 be aware that your destination hosts need to patch to a level that supports specter meltdown.
Another question that been bubbling up is support for Skylake, EVC will only be support for 6.7 and above.
Now let’s talk about how EVC works, it is a masking technology that will mask the functions of newly released processors. Here is a list of Intel processor levels today:
Here is a list of Intel processor levels today:
L0 Intel “Merom” L1 Intel “Penryn”
L1 Intel “Penryn”
L2 Intel “Nehalem”
L3 Intel “Westmere”
L4 Intel “Sandy Bridge”
L5 Intel “Ivy Bridge”
L6 Intel “Haswell
L7 Intel “Broadwell”
L8 Intel “Skylake”
Ok so here are few examples:
L0 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7 L8
EVC enabled at the L5 level “Ivy Bridge” this means that you can vMotion a VM from hosts or clusters that have EVC mode enable at L0-L5 levels. The reason is that CPU instruction sets for L0-L5 are visible to ESXi.
L0 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7 L8
EVC enabled at the L7 level “Broadwell” this means that you can vMotion a VM from hosts or clusters that have EVC mode enable at L0-L7 levels.
L0 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7 L8
EVC is not enabled, each host set compatibility at the level of a processor on the host. Please recall that L8 “Skylake” is only supported on 6.7 so if you have ESXi host with Skylake on 6.5 it will set host CPU instruction set to L7 “Broadwell.”
vPSO 