I have a production cluster of 16 Xeon 56xx-series hosts running ESXi 4.1 with a vCenter 4.1 managing them for HA and DRS. They're setup as using the EVC mode "Intel Xeon 32nm Core i7", but I want to add some older 55xx-series hosts which obviously can't run in that mode (they'll need the "Intel Xeon Core i7" mode instead).
You can increase but not decrease EVC mode 'live' and I can't really take down all the guests, not easily anyway. Is there a way of doing this without?
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
I don't believe there is a way to do it live. The point of EVC is that it ensures all the hosts in the cluster have the same processor capabilities available to the VMs so the VMs are powered on with those processor options available to them. If you were to downgrade the EVC mode you would be eliminating processor functionality that those VMs are (potentially) using which would cause problems.
Check this out http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1513907,00.html