Physical Machine Hardware Maintenance Restrictions

When you replace physical machines (PMs), motherboards, or RAID controllers, you should ensure compatibility by complying with these restrictions:

• New PMs must have processors that are from the same processor family as the existing PM, in order to support live migration. If the processors in the new and existing PMs are from different processor families, you must stop the VMs to migrate them from the existing PM to the new PM.
• CPUs on a replacement PM must be compatible with the CPUs on the original PM.
• In the replacement PM, the quantity of the following resources must be the same or greater than in the original PM:
  • Number of processor cores.
  • Total memory.
  • Total logical disk capacity.
  • Total number of network ports; each port must support, at a minimum, the speed of the existing ports, and all add-on NICs within a particular PM must have the same vendor/model number.
  • Total number of network ports; each port must support, at a minimum, the speed of the existing ports.

In addition, check System Requirements Overview for information about system hardware and software requirements before performing hardware maintenance on a PM, to confirm that the maintenance you are planning complies with any system restrictions.