Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x guest on VMware products reports an unsupported CPU error

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x
  • VMware ESXi Server or other VMware products certified to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest
  • New Intel CPU

Issue

  • When running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x as a guest on VMware ESXi Server or other VMware products with a newer Intel CPU, the installer can stop, printing out the an error similar to the one seen here:
[Unsupported Hardware Detected]

This hardware (or a combination
thereof) is not supported by Red
Hat.  For more information on
supported hardware, please refer
to http://www.redhat.com/hardware.
             [OK]

  • A message similar to the ones below will be printed during boot:

    • [RHEL6.3]
    UNSUPPORTED HARDWARE DEVICE: CPU family 6 model > 59
    • [RHEL6.4 or RHEL6.5]
    UNSUPPORTED HARDWARE DEVICE: Intel CPU model

Resolution

This issue has been fixed in kernel 2.6.32-504.el6 and the error will no longer be displayed when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 or newer as a guest on VMware products:
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2014:1392

If you are running earlier update releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x on a VMware product, the UNSUPPORTED message would be a false alarm. The error dialog box can safely be ignored by pressing the OK button. The error message during boot can also be ignored.

Root Cause

The problem occurs when a customer is running VMWare as the hypervisor with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x as a guest. It appears that VMWare is passing the CPU ID and other info up to the guest and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is detecting that CPU as unsupported hardware. This warning would be correct in a bare-metal environment, but it can be safely ignored if using a VMware hypervisor.

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