Performing a virtual machine live migration across different vendors’ CPUs is probably one of the most wanted feature for several customers that can’t just replace their entire hardware set every time that a new generation of CPUs hits the market.
The topic is so hot that a recent demonstration of its feasibility performed by AMD in collaboration with Red Had immediately became a point of discussion.
VMware (and its investor Intel) commented the effort saying that a cross-CPUs live migration is a too risky operation for the stability of the virtualized workloads.
True or not the virtualization professionals that decide to take the risk may achieve the goal through the so called CPU masking technique.
Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware, discusses the topic and kindly shows how to turn off CPU checking in VI 3.5 in a couple of different ways.
It would be nice if virtualization.info readers could comment this post reporting the nasty effects of these CPU masking approach.