It’s my pleasure to say that EVO:RAIL 1.2 has been released with a number of enhancements. In case you don’t know there have been a number of maintenance releases (1.0.1 and 1.0.2 and 1.1) that shipped at the end of last year, and beginning of this. The 1.1 release rolls up all the changes previously introduces, and critically adds a new step to the configuration of the EVO:RAIL appliance – support for “Enhanced vMotion Compatibility” or EVC
The support for EVC is important step because it will allow both Intel Ivybridge and Intel Haswell based EVO:RAIL systems to co-exist in the same VMware HA and DRS cluster. The new EVC support enables support for the EVC Mode of “IvyBridge” which means a new Haswell system can join an Ivybridge based VMware cluster – and still be allow for vMotion events triggered by DRS or maintenance mode to occur.
Prior to this release of EVO:RAIL, Enhance vMotion Compatibility was not enabled by default. You might ask is it possible on the older release of EVO:RAIL is possible to enabled EVC on systems prior to 1.2? The answer is yes, so long as you follow this order of steps:
- Upgrade your EVO:RAIL appliance to EVO:RAIL 1.1+.
- Connect to the vSphere Web Client and login with administrator privileges.
- From Home, click Hosts and Clusters.
- Click the EVO:RAIL cluster, Marvin-Virtual-SAN-Cluster-<uuid>.
- Click Manage>Settings>Configuration>VMware EVC, click
- Select the “Enable EVC for Intel Hosts” radio button.
- From the VMware EVC Mode dropdown, select “Intel Ivy Bridge Generation”. Click OK.
- The VMware EVC settings will now show that EVC is enabled with mode set to “Intel Ivy Bridge Generation”.
This simple step-by-step process can be carried without shutting down any existing VMs, and would allow a VM running on the IvyBridge system to be vMotion to/from the Haswell system without a problem.
These steps are reproduced from this KB article here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2114368