Enable AVX, EVC, vMotion on VMware ESXi without vSphere and vCenter

[pietrob71]

Hi guys, 3 years ago I wrote a post because I had a problem on a vm of my customer with a software that need AVX support (https://communities.vmware.com/thread/534035).

After some post replies, I suggested to my customer to enable AVX support on that vm and everything was solved.

Now I have a similar issue with the same software on another customer that have a free version of ESXi. Looking for a solution in Google, I found some posts that suggest to enable vMotion, AVX, EVC. The problem is that to enable them it seems to be necessary vSphere or vCenter, but to download these tools you need to have a paid version and the free version of ESXi in not enough.

So, now I'm a little bit confused because I don't understand if the solution to my issue is enable vMotion, AVX, EVC and how can I do that with a free version of ESXi.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Pietro

[kennamm]

Hi, did you get anywhere with this, I have the same problem. I have free esxi 6.5 but there is no way to turn on EVC

[evil242]

Sooo, I may have found the solution, in vSphere 7
First, Power off VM
I found that if you enable EVC for the VM, and select the chipset, say in my case, "Cascade Lake" (config > EVC > Edit, Enable for Intel), then Power On.  Once the VM is powered on, the VM EVC tab said that it had 81 CPU features enabled.

Then I navigated to Edit Settings > VM Options tab, Advanced > Configuration Parameters > Edit Configuration and filter for AVX, and these all appear:

So I tried (after power off) setting the VM back to use cluster mode for EVC, then added the featMask.vm.cpuid.AVX parameters with Val:1 to the VM.  Then powered back on.  All the AVX showed up, and it said the VM had 7 CPU features enabled.

Waiting for the end customer to verify their application accepts that AVX has been enabled.