ESXi 5.1 upgrade issue

[ginger8990]

We have successfully upgraded  an esxi host from 4.1 to 5.1 1065491  in place. But we got some error when tried to live vMotion some VMs. (It is ok when the VM is offline) Not sure it is really the BIOs of Dell R710 host needs to be upgraded or something else? Do you experience the same problem? the error message said: the target host deos not support the virtual machines's hardware requirements. AES instructions (AES-NI) are unsupported or disabled in the BIOS. See kb 1034926 Carryless multiply (PCLMULQDQ) is unsupported or disabled in the BIOs, To resolve CPU incompatibiliteis, use a cluster with enhanced vmotion compatibility (EVC) enabled. see KB 100322

[Alim786]

This error normally occurs when the Hosts are of different CPU family. If they are of the same CPU family, then it maybe a BIOS issue, otherwise you may have to enable EVC Mode. Please see links below :-

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=103492...

VMware KB: Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support

Good Luck !

[ginger8990]

we use only dell machines as hosts , model  R410 , R620 and R710 . all intel processors. We disabled EVC in the vCenter We will try to do BIOs update today to see whether it take care of it.

[jgruenke]

Please be aware that if your BIOS settings do not resolve your issue and you need to enable EVC, you will have to power off every VM in your cluster.  Enabling EVC is not a setting that can be turned on with any workload running on the cluster.  I have included another link that goes through the process of turning on EVC with existing virtual machines.

https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc%2FGUID-DE57...

[ginger8990]

We did BIOs update but it didn't resolve the issue. I just wonder all hosts are Dell servers with exactly same process speed and model. Why did it not work?

I am not sure if we update all BIOs and all ESXi version for all the hosts then it will resolve the issue?