Q: Can I install VMware vSphere Storage Appliance without EVC Enabled?

A:VMware's vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) is a new product, released at the same time as vSphere 5.0, that's intended to provide an alternative virtualinfrastructure for IT environments that don't have a SAN. As an appliance, VMware recommends installing this product onto hosts that are essentiallyunconfigured.

One component of the VSA's installation checks to see if each host can be a part of the same cluster that has VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility(EVC) turned on. Although this verification is extremely important for production environments, EVC isn't supported when evaluating the VSA's softwareatop VMware Workstation. As a result, a slight hack is required to disable the EVC verification.

To disable the EVC check, navigate to C:Program FilesVMwareInfrastructuretomcatwebappsVSAManagerWEB-INFclasses and open the file titleddev.properties. Modify the line evc.config=true to evc.config=false.