[PLUG] Virtual Iron

Michael Ewan mhewan1 at comcast.net
Fri Oct 19 14:12:57 UTC 2007


Robert Kopp wrote:
> Recently hardware that is enhanced for virtualization, notably the AMD-V and Intel VT CPUs have emerged. Not all of it is expensive--a Pentium D 920 CPU is about $130 on Ebay. 
>
> You can download securable.exe and execute it with WINE to see if you have these capabilities. I don't.
>
> Nevertheless, I use virtual machines, so this technology interests me. Does it enhance the performance of VM's a lot? If so, can someone suggest desktop PC's or components that have this capability?
>
>
>   

What Intel VT gives you is the ability to run an unpatched OS in a 
para-virtualized environment i.e. Xen.  Without hardware support for 
virtualization, you cannot run an out-of-the-box OS (Windows, unpatched 
Linux, etc) as a virtual client OS.  There are several good articles 
available on Wikipedia and Xensource on how para-virtualization works, 
versus full hardware abstraction like VMware.

VT will give you a performance boost over full hardware abstraction, 
since your are using the system resources directly rather than multiple 
layers of virtual drivers.




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