[SOLVED] PVE Cluster - How important is it to not mix CPU types (AMD/Intel)?

michaeljd

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Aug 30, 2023
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Looking into setting up a cluster so I can move VMs around and have high availability. I have a mixed AMD Epyc and embedded Xeon server environment. Noticed the PVE 8.0 admin guide says this:

Online migration of virtual machines is only supported when nodes have CPUs from the same vendor. It might work otherwise, but this is never guaranteed.

My VMs are basically a bunch of Windows VMs that are used as workstations and a few Linux VMs running Pi-Hole, Plex and so on. How important is it to not mix host CPU types? Thank you.
 
Online migration may work when the VMs have a CPU type of kvm64 (or qemu64) as this is a very generic virtual CPU.

You could try and set the CPU type of the VMs to the lowest common denominator of all physical CPUs. That may work.

A CPU type of host for the VM will not work.
 
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Thank you for the detailed response, gurubert. It is very helpful. Currently I only have one PVE hosting all my VMs and it's an AMD EPYC system. Most of the VM CPUs are set to "host" as I remember reading you get better performance that way.

If I made all my host machines EPYC-based, would it matter what CPU type (host, kvm64, etc) the VMs were set to? Would I be able to move them between hosts without problems?

I've only been using PVE about 6 months, so still learning. Wish I'd have moved to a virtualized environment a lot sooner.
 
Thanks again, gurubert. Looks like I've got some more planning to do and equipment to buy before I can run a cluster.