A Primer on Virtualization Hardware Extensions (Desktop Edition)
If you've played around with any of the new desktop virtualization software packages, you're probably aware that Intel and AMD both now include special instruction sets in recent processor chipsets that enhance the efficiency and performance of virtualization environments. They're handy for VMware ESX, and provide a performance boost for VMware Workstation.
Further, these virtualization hardware extensions are critical for paravirtualization software like Citrix XenSource. Without these extensions, O/S's would need to be specially recompiled to support paravirtualization -- something that O/S vendors like Microsoft are not likely to do.
In the desktop world, there's plenty of confusion about the virtualization extensions around right now, so I figured I'd pull together a couple of resources that will help you understand what they are and which hardware supports them.
Click past the fold for more.
First up in our list of resources is a document by Intel that explains the use of their VT extensions. This document is highly technical, but discusses from a hardware prospective how the extensions enable virtualization environments to run with better support and performance
Our second document is the Wikipedia list of those software packages currently available on the market today that make use of virtualization extensions.
Lastly, if you're interested in discovering which processor classes actually support the extended instruction sets provided by virtualization extensions, you can check out these three documents for CoreDuo processors, Core2Duo processors, and AMD processors. Note that these are all desktop-level processor classes.
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