vMotion fails with the error: problem detected at CPUID level 0x80000001 register 'edx'

Details

vMotion fails
You see the error:

Unable to migrate from : The CPU of the host is incompatible with the cpu feature requirements of virtual machine; problem detected at CPUID level 0x80000001 register 'edx'

Solution
This issue is caused by the Nx flag setting.

There are 2 options to correct this:

In VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client, select the virtual machine from the Inventory. Click Edit Settings > Options > Advanced > Hide the Nx flag from the guest.

Note: The virtual machine needs to be powered off for the change to take effect.

Check /proc/cpuinfo on both hosts and verify the Flags column is identical. In this case "nx" was missing. Go into the BIOS of each host and enable the setting called no-execute memory protection on both hosts or turn this off on both hosts.

For more information, see Ensuring Virtualization Technology is enabled on your VMware host (1003944).

Note: Execute Protection is Intel eXecute Disable (XD) on Intel processors and AMD No eXecute (NX) on AMD processors.

Why Virtualization Services?

• Cost management and investment control
• Operational scalability
• Rapid deployment of applications
• Efficient use of server resources
• High availability
• Customer control

Service Models

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and
other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run
arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer
does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over
operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of select
networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)
The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumercreated
or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported
by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud
infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over
the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations.

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)
The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a
cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a
thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email). The consumer does not
manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating
systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of
limited user-specific application configuration settings.

Outsourcing the Groupware Layer - Email Application

Overview

• Off-site hosting of groupware systems and mail stores (Exchange, POP/IMAP, etc.)

• The filtering layer is almost always outsourced before the groupware layer. This can be done with the same or different cloud provider.

Critical Things to Consider

Important questions to consider before out­sourcing this layer to the cloud include:

• Does your business have enterprise message routing requirements? Most large organizations have fairly complex routing requirements that are difficult to implement and manage if your groupware system is hosted. For example, many enterprises, especially those with multiple domains, often have complex ‘mes­sage manipulation’ requirements. These include things such as address header rewriting before delivering messages. They have enterprise routing requirements that must rely on sensitive Directory attributes to enforce. This level of message header manipulation and intelligent routing is difficult to implement in the cloud. In these cases an external gateway and/or an on-premises email backbone policy layer is always required; however, even then, message traffic between your organization and the cloud provider will increase substantially.

• Does your organization require sending of large messages and attachments that you know of? Even the large cloud providers such as Google have restrictions on the size of messages that it will handle. For example, pharmaceutical companies require the sending of very large messages.

• Does your company have strict archiving policies? Most enterprises, especially those that are highly regu­lated, have strict email archiving policies that are difficult to implement in the cloud. For example, financial services firms require that all email destined “outside the company” must be retained and messages between certain internal departments be archived. To accomplish this, LDAP attributes must be used to determine the correct policy on any given message. Is your company willing to give sensitive LDAP infor­mation to an external public cloud provider?

• Do you want potentially legal or damaging email to be archived, or even sitting in your end-users inbox, outside the control of your organization?

• Does your company have strict data retention policies? In the cloud, organizations lose control of data retention. While there may be options to make the data inaccessible to the customer after the retention policy, there is no control as to when the data is actually removed from all potential locations (databases, backups, logs, etc.). This can apply to messaging data as well as metadata such as logs.

• What level of trust will you have with your cloud provider? While an organization may trust their cloud provider, they may not know about other third-party partners of that provider. For example, cloud provid­ers may use external storage or back-up providers. You should be aware of any partnerships at the time you establish a contract with the cloud provider, and you should be notified of any new partnerships during the duration of your contract.

• What about confidentiality? With the potential loss of encryption capabilities with cloud services, all data flowing through the provider can be reviewed by the provider or possibly their business partners.

Conclusion and Recommendations

• Enterprises have complex policy and email handling requirements that have proven to be problematic to implement and enforce in the cloud.

• To effectively enforce email policies, enterprises will need to give up certain aspects of the messaging security and policy handling that they currently have with their on-premises solutions. More often than not, this is an unacceptable proposition.

• In order to satisfy enterprise-level message policy and handling requirements, an on-premises external gateway and/or an on-premises email backbone policy layer is almost always required. If this is the case for your organization, and you outsource the groupware layer, this effectively means that the cloud provider is only hosting your message store.

RedHat KVM vs Vsphere vs Microsoft Hyper-V

Features	Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers	VMware vSphere 4.0	Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2
Bare metal hypervisor: A bare metal hypervisor is one that installs directly on the server hardware without requiring a full operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization leverages the modularity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide hypervisor functionality without requiring a monolithic operating system to reside on.	Yes	Yes	Server Core and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 installations are minimum 3 GB disk space.
Small footprint: The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor is <100MB, suitable for installation on local flash storage, boot from SAN, or PXE booting for diskless hosts.	Yes	Yes	No
Security: Only Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization leverages open source, enterprise-grade security developed in partnership with government agencies for high security. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization uses the SELinux standard for security and is backed by Red Hat Network for security updates.	Yes	No	No
CPU virtualization: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-H is able to virtualize up to 256 logical CPUs (combination of cores and hyperthreading) on each host for resentation to virtual machines. Each VM can use up to 16 vCPUs for maximum efficiency.	Maximum 256 vCPUs per host. 256 logical CPUs per host. 16 vCPUs per VM.	Maximum 512 vCPUs per host. 64 logical CPUs per host. 8 vCPUs per VM	Maximum 64 vCPUs per host. 64 logical CPUsper host. 8 vCPUs per VM
Memory over commitment: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can allocate more virtual memory to its VMs than the host has physical memory.	Yes	Yes	No
Page sharing: Memory page sharing allows VMs with like operating systems to share physical memory to store redundant memory pages.	Yes	Yes	No
Processor hardware memory assist: Reduces the time required to exchange memory resources between the host and the virtual machine using the latest x86 processors.	Yes	Yes	No
Virtual NIC s: The hypervisor can present to each virtual machine multiple virtual network interface cards, each of which can map to different virtual networks and physical NICs on the host machine.	8 per guest	10 per guest	Max of 8 “internal” NICS for VM to VM traffic, 4 “external” NICS for connection to rest of Network
vLAN s: Support for virtual LANs on the virtual NICs inside the virtual infrastructure.	Yes	Yes	Requires Host OS and VM OS configuration
Network offload: Reduces CPU resources needed to process virtual networking and network IO by offloading to compatible NIC hardware.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Guest operating systems	Supports Windows 2003, 2008, XP, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5+	Support for most x86 operating systems, including Windows, Linux, UNIX	Windows 2003, 2008 (certain SPs only), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5+ only
Intelligent failover: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization high availability ensures that high priority virtual machines are automatically restarted on failure of the VM itself or the host on which it resides.	Yes	Requires Advanced or higher	Requires Windows Clustering
Maintenance mode: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hosts undergoing maintenance automatically have their guest VMs migrated to other available hosts and are removed as targets for migration until maintenance is complete.	Yes	Yes	No
Shared resource pools: Pools of resources such as CPU, memory, and storage are aggregated and managed at the datacenter or cluster level rather than machine-bymachine.	Yes	Yes	No
Cluster resource policies: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization allows administrators to set cluster policies for resource smoothing.	Yes	Enterprise and Enterprise Plus only (DRS)	No
Shared storage: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can use NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel shared storage for the storage of virtual machines.	Yes	Yes	Limited
VM snapshots: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machine snapshots allow administrators to apply patches and upgrades in a transactional way and roll back to a known good snapshot if the patch runs into an issue.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Storage multipathing	Yes	Yes	Yes
Virtual disk files: Virtual disks are stored as disk files on the various storage domains.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Storage virtualization: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization aggregates and distributes storage resources to maximize flexibility and utilization.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Application programming interface (API )	Yes	Yes	yes
Logging: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager provides extensive logging for troubleshooting and research.	Yes	Yes	Yes
PXE boot support: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager supports PXE boot for network installation of virtual machines.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Active directory integration: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager interfaces with your existing Microsoft Active Directory for user access and authentication.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Access control: Administrative and user access to your virtual datacenter can be controlled and managed from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remote console: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager allows console access to virtual machines using secure VNC or desktop optimized SPICE remote desktop technology.	Yes	Yes	Yes
System monitoring: System status can be monitored from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.	Yes	Yes	Requires SCOM
Alerts and notifications: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can report errors and warnings to administrators via email.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Central control and visibility: Red Hat Enterprise virtualization Manager is your single-view Management GUI for your entire enterprise virtualization infrastructure.	Yes	Yes	Requires multiple products to fully manage
Thin provisioning: Allows the creation of virtual machines with virtual disks that do not take up all of their allowed space upon creation. This allows better use of storage resources as needed.	Yes	Yes	Yes