Powered on Virtual Machines on an Intel® Ice Lake Host with Intel Ice Lake CPU prevent enabling Intel® Ice Lake Generation EVC Mode at Cluster Level or moving the host into EVC enabled cluster.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Host has a CPU from Intel^® Ice Lake Generation and has powered on virtual machines with hardware version is 16 or above
• Virtual machine may show minimum/current EVC more as Intel^® Sapphire Rapids even with Cluster/Per-VM EVC disabled.
  • Some VMs may not show the EVC mode in the UI (MinRequiredEVCModeKey is blank)
• Enabling  Intel^® Ice Lake Generation EVC baseline on the cluster, fails with error : The target host does not support the virtual machine's current hardware requirements. AVX512VPOPCNTDQ is unsupported. 
  
  from /var/log/vmware/vpxd.log

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS info vpxd[47036] [Originator@6876 sub=Default opID=l8w3d8ag-12075351-auto-76teh-h5:71458976-6f] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-31157933 -- evcdomain-c3632668 -- vim.cluster.EVCManager.configureEvc: vim.fault.EVCAdmissionFailedVmActive:
--> Result:
--> (vim.fault.EVCAdmissionFailedVmActive) {
-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
-->    faultMessage = <unset>,
-->    productName = <unset>,
-->    productVersion = <unset>,
-->    faults = (vmodl.MethodFault) [
-->       (vim.fault.FeatureRequirementsNotMet) {
-->          faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
-->          faultMessage = <unset>,
-->          featureRequirement = (vim.vm.FeatureRequirement) [
-->             (vim.vm.FeatureRequirement) {
-->                key = "cpuid.avx512vpopcntdq",
-->                featureName = "cpuid.avx512vpopcntdq",
-->                value = "Bool:Min:1"
-->             }
-->          ],
-->          vm = <unset>,
-->          host = 'vim.HostSystem:C3F40076-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXX:host-00000000'
-->          msg = ""
-->       },
 

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Cause

• VMs with hardware version 16 and above are capable of using feature AVX512VPOPCNTDQ if provided by the Host CPU.  Intel^® Ice Lake Generation CPUs have this feature.
• Powering on a VM with hardware version 16 and above on these hosts with  Intel^® Ice Lake Generation CPUs will enable start using the AVX512VPOPCNTDQ feature.

The Intel^® Ice Lake Generation EVC baseline in the vCenter Server, does not include support for AVX512VPOPCNTDQ. This will prevent enabling Intel^® Ice Lake Generation EVC baseline on the cluster or moving the host into into an existing cluster with same baseline as the powered on virtual machine already using feature AVX512VPOPCNTDQ .

Resolution

To enable Ice Lake EVC Mode on an existing cluster of Hosts with Intel^® Ice Lake Generation CPUs,

• Power off virtual machines with hardware version greater than 16 and without any per virtual machine EVC Settings.
• Enable Intel^® Ice Lake Generation EVC on the cluster
• Power on the virtual machines

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
Enabling Intel^® Ice Lake Generation EVC on the Cluster with support hosts that have virtual machines on hardware version 16 or higher requires downtime on the virtual machines.