vSphere EVC Design for a Virtual Infrastructure Workload Domain

If you enable vSphere Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) in the VI workload domain, customer workloads can be migrated between ESXi hosts containing older CPUs. You can use EVC for a rolling upgrade of all hardware with zero downtime.

EVC works only with CPUs from the same manufacturer and there are limits to the version difference gaps between the CPU families.

Table 1. Design Decisions on Enhanced vMotion Compatibility for a VI Workload Domain

Decision ID	Design Decision	Design Justification	Design Implication
VCF-WLD-VCS-CLS-018	Enable Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) on all clusters in the VI workload domain.	Supports cluster upgrades without virtual machine downtime.	You can enable EVC only if the clusters contain hosts with CPUs from the same vendor.
VCF-WLD-VCS-CLS-019	Set the cluster EVC mode to the highest available baseline that is supported for the lowest CPU architecture on the hosts in the cluster.	Supports cluster upgrades without virtual machine downtime.	None.