I have been working on setting up a small cluster of Hyper-V Hosts (running as VMs), nested under a bunch of physical VMware ESXi 5.0 hosts. Bear in mind I am quite new to Hyper-V, I have only ever really played with single host Hyper-V setups in the past. Having just finishing creating a Hyper-V failover cluster in this nested environment, and configuring CSV (Cluster Shared Volume) Storage for the Hyper-V hosts, I created a single VM to test the “live migrate” feature of Hyper-V. Upon telling the VM to live migrate from host “A” to host “B”, I got the following error message.
“There was an error checking for virtual machine compatibility on the target node”. The description reads “The virtual machine is using processor-specific features not supported on physical computer “DEVHYP02E”.
So my first thought was, perhaps there is a way to mask processor features, similar to the way VMware’s EVC for host physical CPU compatibility works? If you read the rest of the error message it does seem to indicate that there is a way of modifying the VM to limit processor features used.
So the solution in this case is to:
- First of all power down your VM
- Using Hyper-V Manager, right-click the VM and select “Settings”
- Go to the “Processor” section and tick the option on for “Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version” under “Processor compatibility”
- Apply settings
- Power up the VM again
So now if you try and live migrate to another compatible Hyper-V host, the migration should work.