Hi Mario,
We're looking at Intel Xeon X series and Intel Xeon E5 series processors, so the EVC baseline shouldn't need to be set too low.
We can afford some downtime. I assume similarly with editing a EVC baseline, if I were to go from enabled (say, Intel Sandybridge) to disable EVC, it won't affect running VM's or hosts, but the VM's themselves will requite a full shutdown and power on to benefit from the additional instructions avaliable?
So, with that in mind:
-Enable EVC compatibility on vCenter 5.1 Cluster
-Disconnect old hosts from vCenter 4.1
-Connect new hosts to vCenter 5.1 into existing cluster
-Migrate VM's from old host to new "proxy" host
-Storage vMotion VM from existing storage to new storage.
-Disable EVC compatibility on vCenter 5.1 Cluster (All new hosts in this cluster are from the same processor family, speed, etc)
-Power Down VM's
-Power On VM's
-Disconnect old hosts from vCenter 5.1
-Connect old hosts back to vCenter 4.1
How does that sound?
Thanks,
David