FT Fails to Power on Secondary VM

[Phylum]

I'm confused - perhaps misguided - and I hope someone can help me out.

After turning on FT for a test VM, it says the system fails to power on the fault tolerance secondary vm.:

For the primary ESXi host (Xeon E5504):

• Virtual machines in the same Fault Tolerance pair cannot be on the same host.

For the secondary ESXi host (Xeon L5408):

• Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine's requirements.
  Mismatch detected for these features:
  CPU model does not match

Both hosts are connected to the same iSCSI LUN

Both hosts are running the same version of ESXi (4.1.0, 502767)

Both hosts are running the same version of FT (2.0.1-2.0.0-2.0.0)

Both hosts are in the same cluster with EVC mode set to Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2

Both processors are supported by FT according to http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008027

Bost host CPU's report FT support via the VMware host CPU Info utility (http://www.run-virtual.com/?page_id=38)

• 
• Note: The AMD server is not part of the cluster but is in the same datacenter

I installed & ran SiteSurvey and everything checks out except for 'Compatible ESX Hosts' and 'Shared Storage'.

Compatible ESX Hosts links me to http://www.vmware.com/support/sitesurvey/help_2_5_3.html#pairing

• "Pairing ESX servers for FT - FT requires at least two (three recommended) compatible ESX servers. See the above table to determine which CPU types can be paired together. In addition, ESX hosts must be running the same version of ESX to be paired together for FT."

So is this because I'm doing this with a 54xx and 55xx...?  Is there no amount of masking that will make this work?

Shared Storage links me to http://www.vmware.com/support/sitesurvey/help_2_5_3.html#storage

• "Shared Storage Required for FT - ESX hosts used together as an FT cluster must share storage for the protected Virtual Machines. For this reason VMware SiteSurvey lists the shared storage it detects for each ESX host and flags hosts which do not have any shared storage in common. In addition, an FT-protected VM must itself be stored on shared storage and any disks connected to it must be shared storage."

This I don't understand why since they're using the same iSCSI LUN (not NFS).

[vmroyale]

Hello.

So is this because I'm doing this with a 54xx and 55xx...?  Is there no amount of masking that will make this work?

Yes - the 5504 is in the Intel Xeon Nehalem category and the 5408 is in the Intel Xeon Penryn category. The processors need to be from the same category.

Good Luck!

[Phylum]

Thanks for the super prompt response.  I figured that was the case so I'm working on remedying that.

Any thoughts on the [alleged] apparent storage issue though?  I read some articles late last week and over the weekend about NFS shares not having the same volume ID (forgive, I don't recall the correct terminology).  That had to do with how the shares were created on each host (upper vs lower case vs hostname vs fqdn vs IP etc).  Since I'm not dealing with an NFS share I don't think that applies here.

[Phylum]

I've got a replacement Nehalem system on the way but I'm still concerned about the apparent storage issue.  I've removed the VM and the iSCSI LUN from both hosts, confirmed no CD's are mounted and verified all vmdk's are stored on the LUN.

What does it expect?  How can I track down the storage problem?

[vmroyale]

Can you post a screenshot of your hosts Configuration tab with the Datastores view showing the storage?

[Phylum]

I hope this is what you're looking for configuration wise?