Hardware Assisted Virtualization - The Promised Land?

Intel and AMD marketing departments have been busy these past 12-months or so using Virtualization to differentiate their processors, but when will the enterprise benefit from x86 Hardware Assisted Virtualization? In a nutshell, Hardware Assisted Virtualization means the processors removing some of the architectural inefficiencies the hypervisor had to provide in software. AMD-V (aka Pacifica) combined with direct attached memory and on-chip memory controller looks the most interesting technology with extensions, Tagged TLBs, DEV (Device Exclusion Vectors) in the current shipping of Rev-F Opteron processors. Yet it's the Nested Page Tables expected with AMD's Quad core which provides the most interesting development. Now ask when the hypervisor vendors will enable this new capability and life gets a little more complicated. Microsoft and Xen tout they are AMD-V aware and support Intel's VT, but all I hear from Vmware is next year??? See you at VMworld, I know the answers I'm looking for!
- InsomniacsAnonymous

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(N.B. As an employee of Sun Microsystems, the opinions expressed here are purely my own and not necessarily that of Sun or any other party).
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Posted by 142258 [Virtualization] ( November 02, 2006 10:59 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]