RHEL 10 Installation Fails with "Fatal glibc" CPU Unsupported Error on VMware EVC Sandy Bridge Clusters

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When installing RHEL 10 or later on a virtual machine, the following error message may appear on the VM console, causing installation failure:

"deprecated hardware is detected: x86_64-v2: genuine Intel Xeon Gold 6534 will not be maintained in a future major release and may be disabled. Fatal glibc error: CPU does not support x86_64-v3"

This occurs because the required CPU instruction set baseline (x86_64-v3) is not available in the VM’s virtual CPU.

Environment

RHEL 10 or higher

VMware vSphere cluster with Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enabled

EVC mode configured at Sandy Bridge or below CPU baseline

Cause

Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) masks CPU features to ensure live migration compatibility across hosts with different CPUs in a cluster.

• The Sandy Bridge EVC baseline only exposes AVX instructions and masks newer CPU instructions such as AVX2.
• RHEL 10 and above require AVX2 support, which corresponds to the x86_64-v3 CPU feature set as per Exploring x86-64-v3 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 | Red Hat Developer
• Because EVC at Sandy Bridge masks AVX2, the VM’s virtual CPU does not meet RHEL 10's requirements, resulting in fatal glibc errors during installation.

For further details see: Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support

Resolution

1. Validate VMware EVC compatibility for the cluster

   • Use the Broadcom | VMware | Hardware Compatibility Guide to confirm that all hosts in the cluster support the desired EVC baseline (Broadwell or above) 

2. Upgrade the EVC mode to Broadwell or above

• • Broadwell and later EVC baselines support AVX2 and the x86_64-v3 CPU instruction set required by RHEL 10+.

  • Change the cluster EVC mode via vCenter:

    • Navigate to the cluster in vSphere Web Client

    • Go to Configure > Settings > VMware EVC

    • Click Edit, enable EVC for Intel hosts, and select Broadwell or a higher CPU baseline

    • Save settings and power cycle the running VMs for the new CPU baseline to take effect