[VMC on AWS] HCX RAV migration from On-Prem to VMC with EVC enabled (Broadwell baseline) fails

Products

• VMware HCX
• VMware Cloud on AWS

Issue/Introduction

To explain the reason this RAV migration will fail and provide the workarounds available.

Symptoms:

A powered on VM, residing on a host with Ice Lake CPU (Broadwell baseline), will fail to hot migrate to a VMC on AWS i3.metal host with an error indicating:

The features supported by the processors in this machine are different from the features supported by the processors in the machine on which the virtual machine state was saved.

Cause

The cpuid.STEPPING value in the VM's VMX file is being recorded incorrectly.

Resolution

A permanent resolution is still being worked upon.  Please leverage one of the workarounds in the meantime.

Workaround:
1) Cold migration
  2) Upgrade ESX on OnPrem side to ESX 7.0u3 or above first, and do the migration.
  3) Use i4i instead of i3 as the OnPrem server has Ice Lake CPU.

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
Inability to RAV migrate a VM that has EVC enabled with the Broadwell baseline to a VMC on AWS i3.metal host.