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VMware ESX: Enhanced VMotion Compatibility

The classic VMotion problem of recent times is the customer who buys tin from a vendor, only to find out that the processor number e.g. 53xx and 54xx, is actually quite significant. The principle difference which will prevent VMotion is the addition of SSE4.1 to the 54xx range of Intel processors (if you previously only had 53xx Intel processors). An application using the SSE4.1 feature (or is aware of this feature) when VMotioned to a non-SSE4.1 host would likely blue screen trying to make use of this feature on the older host. People then recalled the CPU mask feature in VMware - we’ll just mask it out they thought. Unfortunately VMware declared this was an unsupported mask with KB1993 and KB1991. Note that for production environments, VMware neither supports nor recommends modifying VMotion masks for SSE3, SSE3, or SSE4.1 because of the risk of failure of the application or guest operating system after migration. The reason soon became clear: * SSE features can be used by ...
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CPU compatibility override for VMotion

To do a fast POC, we did : Pick all test boxes and VM'ed them one by one: time taken 3 days! Take a cat 5e cross cable and setup your VMkernel port traffic Do trunking, or as your Net admin to do so; we had DMZ and Secure VLANs Setup a seperate DL 320 box for Virtual Center 2.0.1 and VMware Converter CPU problems for VMotion we fixed as below This applies specifically for HP G4 (regular dual socket xeon boxes) machines and G5 (typical multicore boxes)! so please don't just do it and DO NOT EVER DO THIS IN PRODUCTION! Your production machines must comply with the compatibility since this you need to do for every VM and that is not the right way to go ab out it, we did this just for a fast POC: and voila, you can do and demo VMotion to your management! Also check this important KB articles which John Troyer points to.
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esxcfg-nics and esxcfg-vswitch

with 3.0.2, I see these steps as "regular" post-installation issues. They shouldn't be that way, but with 3.0.2 , they just are. Right now I asked my Network Admin to fix the issue and give me all the NICs on 1Gb network. One of the , not onboard NICs, just failed to come online when I tried to change the settings with the esxcfg-nics, a new command BTW, to 1Gb. I had to then change the SC to point to the onboard, Broadcom on DL 380 G5 box, NIC. And I see that this blogger too experienced similar issues.
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