The usual IT babble
Posts tagged VMotion
Extending VMotion compatiblity (continued)
Jul 14th
Remember my last post about cpu masking ? Well, turns out that you can do it to a “template”.
The only point you don’t need to do, is to mark the VM as a “template“. You still can clone it and move it around and all that other stuff, but the good part is, that the cloned VM keeps the cpu mask set to the “template” *shrug*
I don’t know, why VMware didn’t include that feature into the templates, since it’s a real freaky way to do.
Extending VMotion compatiblity
Jul 4th
Today I did something horrible. I yet again noticed that I bought the wrong CPU’s (basically I bought Xeon DP’s with four cores). Those have apparently a feature called SSSE3, which makes VMotion with our old Xeon DP’s (dual cores) fail before even trying.
But as we had a cooling outage today (basically ’cause it broke), I needed to turn off some ESX servers. Thus leaving me with the new ones and one of the old ones. *yuck*
So after a bit of googling, I found this VMware KB entry, which luckily lists the registers (on level 1) you need to zero out.
1 2 | ecx ---- ---- ---- -0-- ---- --0- ---0 -0-- edx ---- ---- ---- --0- ---- ---- ---- ---- |
Only problem after that was that it still wasn’t enough. So back to the drawing board. The final solution came rather quick and looks like this:
1 2 3 | eax ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- 0--0 ---- ---- ecx ---- ---- ---- -0-- ---- --0- ---0 -0-- edx ---- ---- ---- --0- ---- ---- ---- ---- |
The only stupid thing about this is, that
- it ain’t supported by VMware (as in if you’re having trouble with your ESX/VC and you have a VM running with this, you’re shit outta luck!)
- you have to define this on a *per VM basis*, which really is a pain in the ass for larger installations
True, I just should’ve bought VMotion compatible CPU’s, that would have spared me the hassle … but it’s too late now, I have to live with those ones.