vmotion – vmotion interface is not configured

Why document this – it’s super easy and 1000 people have already created a very similar document…

I’ve come to discover that most ‘technical’ people are not always the ones who can memorize the most stuff, but rather the ones that keep the best notes. I.e., memorizing the specifics for each step of the recirculation process for OTV encapsulation/decapsulation = hard. Working through the process in detail one or two times and documenting it for further reference = much easier. My documentation habits have been hit or miss to say the least and I’ve come to realize that since I can’t memorize everything I need a good place to store content and (hopefully) find it quickly in the future. I’m going to try documenting anything that’s helpful to me via public blog so that I can have the content for future reference along with using public search engines to find it.

Thank you google for almost always knowing exactly what I need exactly when I need it (and for not caring about my horrible spelling mistakes). Please continue to crawl my blog so I can just build my content in one place 🙂

Working with vCenter, I was having trouble getting storage Vmotion (really any vmotion) to work. I have two different test servers with different CPUs:

Server 1: Dell Inc. PowerEdge R610, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650
Server 2: PowerEdge T310, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3430

I wanted to put these servers in a cluster, and since they had different CPU generations, I decided to enable EVC (Enhanced Vmotion Compatibility) so that Vmotion would continue to work between them. If you’re like me and not up to date on current CPU ‘codenames’ from AMD or Intel, you’ll find this compatibility matrix pretty handy (thank you virten.net)
http://www.virten.net/2013/04/intel-cpu-evc-matrix/

From this chart I was able to glean:

Server 1: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650, ‘Westmere‘
Server 2: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3430, ‘Westmere‘

I had some trouble adding both hosts into the cluster using the Westmere generation so I had to go one generation below and use Nehalem:

OK. At this point, I successfully add both hosts into the cluster (obviously skipping a few of the import steps here) and I test Vmotion. No luck. I get the following error:

“The vMotion interface is not configured (or is misconfigured) on the Destination host”