Migrating Linux VMs from AMD to Intel hardware

[NYSteve]

Hi,

     My team is going to be creating an entirely new environment for ESXi 4.1, with Intel hosts.  At the moment, we have an ESX 3.5 environment with AMD hosts.  Now, I don't believe that it will be a problem to cold migrate our Windows VMs over to the new hosts, since the OS recognizes both types of CPU families.  However, after doing a bit of reading, I understand that our Linux VMs could have a kernel panic if this same migration is attempted.

     My question is this: can the existing Linux VMs be altered, ie., have the proper kernel installed, or proper modules, have the boot loader edited, etc., that would allow the migrated VM to utilize the Intel CPUs when it is booted?

     Thanks for your thoughts on this!

     Steve

[DSTAVERT]

Welcome to the communities

I would clone a sample or two of your current Linux guests and test them on an Intel platform. Not all kernels and not all distributions will behave the same. If you do experience an issue you at least have the oportunity to work around the issue prior to implimentation.

[AndreTheGiant]

You can have issues with customized kernel, with specific CPU optimization.

But usually no problem.

Andre

[NYSteve]

OK, that being the case, could someone tell me if the Redhat or SUSE distros install a CPU brand-specific kernel or modules at install time?  If not, are there boot options that can be changed to reflect the change in hardware?

When we receive the new Intel servers I do plan on cloning a few of our existing VMs, then cold migrating them and watching for errors at bootup.  I'm just hoping there is a way to swap out kernels or modules before the migration.  That would save our Linux support team a lot of hassle reinstalling applications.

[AndreTheGiant]

With Suse, Mandriva, CentOS, RedHat, Fedora not issue.

I mean really "custom", like Gentoo o manually built kernel.

Andre

[DSTAVERT]

The modules won't be an issue if you have installed VMware tools. I haven't experienced issues moving between Intel and AMD but it has been a while.

You might want to use VMware Workstation or I presume Player on an Intel Desktop machine and install ESX(i) as a guest. If you are using 32Bit Linux machines you should be able to run them as guests inside the virtual ESXi machine.