Considering XenServer: mixing hardware configurations

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I'm having an internal debate over using XenServer and hoping for some info from 'those who are more informed'.

Specifically: VMWare states that it's not a great idea to mix hardware of different configurations when building a VMotion / HA setup. Does this advice hold true for XenServer and it's equivalent ('XenMotion')?

Best Answer

You need "broadly compatible hardware" to create a XenServer Pool. According to the docs (below), the main concern is the CPU's. I can not find any written details about disks, network etc although anecdotally from my own experience, it will make your life much easier if you do have identical hardware, especially the NIC's.

A pool may contain up to 16 servers running the same version of XenServer software, at the same patch level, and with broadly compatible hardware - see Pool Requirements for details of hardware and configuration prerequisites.

All of the servers in a XenServer resource pool must have broadly compatible CPUs, that is:

  • The CPU vendor (Intel, AMD) must be the same on all CPUs on all servers. In particular AMD-V and Intel VT CPUs cannot be mixed.
  • All of the CPUs must have the same feature set. To allow servers with non-identical CPUs to be members of the same pool, CPU masking can be used to hide incompatible features.
  • To run HVM (Windows) virtual machines, all CPUs must have virtualization enabled.

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xencenter-61/xs-xc-pools-requirements.html http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xencenter-61/xs-xc-pools-about.html

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