Hybrid Cloud is a popular topic for our customers lately. Especially now that VMware customers can run their application workloads in any of the six major public cloud providers, as well as multiple sites on-premises. Also, with powerful tools like HCX, that can live-migrate applications between all these sites without downtime. There is no better time to start thinking about the Hybrid cloud.
But, to migrate those applications, there is one issue that is often forgotten. Are all the physical CPUs at all of your sites exactly the same? Probably not. The good thing is we have a simple solution to solve this problem.
Ever since vSphere 6.7, we added a new feature to the guest VM Hardware version 14. Per-VM EVC mode. EVC mode (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility), was previously set on a per cluster basis. Now, this handy feature is built into the individual guest VM. This setting allows you to lower the available CPU instruction sets to the lowest common CPU type that your VMs might migrate too. With EVC mode tied to the Guest VM, this setting now moves with the VM between all your Clouds.
Are you considering adopting a hybrid cloud architecture? If so, when was the last time you upgraded your application VMs HW version? Updating the HW version on your VMs now is a great way to prepare your VMs for the future of Hybrid Cloud.
To learn more about how to update your VMs to Per-EVC mode check out these blog and documentation links.
Configuring Per-VM EVC with PowerCLI
https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2018/05/configuring-per-vm-evc.html
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility as a Virtual Machine Attribute
