VMware EVC - New host in vCenter 5.1 not in EVC generation options

Question

We installed a new host on our infrastructure. The specifications of the other hosts are as follow:

Super Micro
X8DTT
Intel Xeon CPU
E5620 @2.4Ghz

Super Micro
X8DTT
Intel Xeon CPU
E5606 @2.13Ghz

Super Micro
X8DTT
Intel Xeon CPU
E5645 @2.4Ghz

Intel Core i7
950 @3.07Ghz

The new host's specifications look like this:

Dell PowerEdge R900
Intel Xeon CPU
X7350 @2.93Ghz

After the new host was installed, I was not able to migrate a VM from another host. The virtual machine requires hardware features that are unsupported or disabled on the target host
*SSE4.1
*SSE4.2

We can see this processor belongs to the Tigerton generation. However, EVC does not have Tigerton listed under the generations.

My questions are the following:

1. Can a generation on EVC mess with our current infrastructure and affect our VM's?
2. Which generation will work for Tigerton? And if it does not work, what are the risks for my other VM's?

Answer 1

1. In case the software inside your VMs relies on a CPU feature that the chosen EVC mode hides it will crash. A lot of software doesn't take some CPU features for granted and falls back to doing things themselves ("in software") instead of offloading tasks to specialized CPU instructions. So even if your software can run without certain CPU features you might face a serious performance impact when you hide CPU features through EVC.

2. According to this EVC "Merom" should be the correct one for Tigerton.