Installing vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.5 fails with error: Cannot create VSA cluster: ESXi host XXX has running VMS that are using CPU features not supported by other ESXi hosts.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• You are installing vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.5 in an Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enabled cluster.
  
  
• There are running virtual machines (VMs) on the ESXi host where VSA is to be installed.
  
  
• The VSA installer displays this error message:
  
  Cannot create VSA cluster: ESXi host XXX has running. VMS that are using CPU features not supported by other ESXi hosts. The running VM should be on the ESXi host with the smallest CPU feature set. Please refer to EVC mode section of online help for more information.

Environment

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5.x

Cause

The vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.5 installer attempts to configure itself to use Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC). However, EVC mode on a host cannot be changed when there are running virtual machines (VMs) on that host.

Resolution

To work around this issue and to allow vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) operations to complete, configure VSA not to use Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC). This ensures that VSA does not attempt to configure EVC in your Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster.

To configure VSA not to use EVC:

1. Open a remote console or RDP session to the Windows server on which the VSA Manager is installed.
   
   
2. Open the %programfiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\VSAManager\WEB-INF\classes\dev.properties file using a text editor.
   
   
3. Locate the line having the configuration variable evc.config and modify its value from true to false.
   
   
4. Restart the VMware VirtualCenter Management Web services. For more information, see Stopping, starting, or restarting VMware vCenter Server services (1003895).

Additional Information

For more information on Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), see Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212).Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support
How to stop, start, or restart vCenter Server services