[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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