How to enable EVC on a single cluster environment when the vCenter VM resides in that cluster

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Customer has mixed CPU hosts in a single cluster and wants to enable EVC

Environment

VMware vCenter 6.x
VMware vCenter 7.x
VMware vCenter 8.x

Cause

We need to power off VMs in this environment to enable EVC on the cluster, but that would power off the vCenter VM which is needed to enable EVC

Resolution

Disable DRS on this cluster

Place the vCenter VM on a host with the oldest generation CPU on it.

Power off and power back on the vCenter VM

Move that host out of the cluster.

Then power off the VMs in the cluster and enable EVC, and then re-add the host with the vCenter VM back to the cluster