I recently migrated my VMs to a new server featuring a Ryzen CPU (essentially same Zen architecture as EPYC.) One VM running Windows 8.1 started complaining about "unsupported hardware" and started refusing to download updates. (Thanks, Micro$oft. Insert your favorite expletive here.)
I've found a workaround called "WSUS Offline" and am in the process of testing it. However, it is unwieldy and I'm still not sure if it will actually work.
I know other hypervisors have the capability of hiding the host processor from the VM and mimicking other types of CPU. Does ESXi share this ability? In this particular scenario, that capability would make my life much easier.