Intel Virtualization Technology???

[sswilson]

I'm planning on looking into this over the weekend, but would certainly appreciate any insights you folks might have on the subject......

Aside from offering hardware support for VMware type applications, does it do anything for us?

Are there any apps which currently take advantage of it?

Is there a benefit/penalty for having it enabled/disabled in bios?

[sswilson]

I haven't forgotten this..... there just doesn't seem to be much info out there as to the effects of having it enabled if you don't plan to use software that takes advantage of it.

I have seen a few posts on overclocking which suggested that turning it off will enhance stability, but I've yet to see any proof of this.

I'll probably do some benchmarking once I get a full fledged S775 board installed on my system (hopefully soon) to see if I can produce any results pro/con.

(Still hoping that somebody out there has some info on this.... :) ).

[pscout]

I haven't seen or heard of any oc'ing benefit from having it turned off or on.

AFAIK, there are not any apps per se that use it ... it is really to enable the running of multiple os's concurrently on your pc using software like vmware.

Many folding folks used it and the free version of the vmware server to enable them to run the 64 bit linux SMP folding client initially, before stanford released their win smp client.

So it is a pretty nice way to be able to run linux at the same time as wxp without needing to use dual boot.

And for those folks that run native linux, there is a version of it that lets you run windows under linux!

If you have enough resources, you can run multiple os's under it at the same time.

vmware i think helped create the market to some degree ... many large companies were looking for ways to reduce the number of physical servers they needed to buy and operate for their hundreds, or even thousands of 'standalone' windows and linux based servers apps. MS's Windows datacentre edition has only ever been used much for very large scale single mission apps, as opposed to the mainframe world where the norm is for many different apps to run on the same os and hardware.

There are similar things happening in the Unix server marketplace, but outside of vmware and linux, I think most of them are based on the various proprietary Unix's (and probably proprietary hardware) and allow for consolidation of solaris or aix servers onto larger scale hardware.

VMware has some pretty cool features when you are running the enterprise versions (which cost 10's of 000's) ... you can move a running virtual machine from one machine to another while it is running! ... clone images to give developers their own virtual dedicated environment in minutes, instead of hours or even days of software install work. Lots of efficiencies for big companies (like the one i work for).

Some apps don't lend themselves to vmware style sharing because of things like very heavy database usage, network usage/config's or poorly coded apps that depend on low level software interfaces (ie below the virtualization layer). VMware provides a virtual bios. VT basically provides segmentation support. Newer AMD's also support it. It isn't very suitable for high performance video intensive workstation apps because of the extra software overhead.

The free vmware is pretty easy to setup so give it a try. Here is a link to settting it up + ubuntu for folding Beginners guide to VMWare and SMP install - Overclockers Forums

and there are other similar guides around .... that thread has links to some of them.

Using the Microsoft Virtual Machine software (which is actually pretty cool I might add) on my Windows Vista OS, I was able to run movies, rudimentary DOS games etc on my virtual machine. I don't know how much of that was my vanderpool support or not, but it ran very very smoothly on my quad core Xeon 3220.

[pscout]

Originally Posted by Misoprostol

Using the Microsoft Virtual Machine software (which is actually pretty cool I might add) on my Windows Vista OS, I was able to run movies, rudimentary DOS games etc on my virtual machine. I don't know how much of that was my vanderpool support or not, but it ran very very smoothly on my quad core Xeon 3220.

Cool! ... now for another test ... join the HCF folding team and watch that x3220 fold some smp wu's !!

I have some x3210's that are ready to match its output ... and zim offered to match as well with one of his 5355's

[enaberif]

X86 virtualization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Software utilizing VT

The following software is known to conditionally make use of virtualization technology features:

    * Blue Pill (malware) uses AMD Pacifica
    * Enomalism - Management console for the Xen hypervisor
    * Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
    * Microsoft Virtual PC — As of Virtual PC 2007 supports both Intel VT-x and AMD AMD-V. VPC 2007 was released on 19 February 2007
    * Microsoft Virtual Server — a future version (Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, to be released in Q1 2007[5][6]) will support Intel VT and AMD Pacifica extensions.
    * Parallels Workstation — lightweight hypervisor with Intel VT-x and AMD AMD-V support.
    * Padded Cell - virtual machine technology from Green Hills Software used with INTEGRITY real-time operating system. Supports Intel VT-x and can run Linux, Windows and more.
    * Real-Time Systems RTS Real-Time Hypervisor for x86
    * TRANGO real-time embedded hypervisor
    * VirtualBox supports VT, but does not enable it by default. As with VMware, the developers state that it slows down virtualization, at least for those guest operating systems for which their software virtualization has been optimized.[7]
    * Virtual Iron - Virtual Iron 3.5 is the first virtualization software that fully supports hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel-VT and AMD-V) to execute unmodified 32 and 64-bit guest operating systems (Windows, RedHat and Suse) with near native performance. Intel and AMD both have contributed support for their extensions to the Virtual Iron open source virtualization, allowing it to execute unmodified guest operating systems. Virtual Iron refers to this architecture as "native virtualization".
    * VirtualLogix VLX uses hardware assised virtualization (VT) to run unmodified guest OSs including Linux and Real-Time operating systems.
    * VMware — on Intel processors, VMware Workstation 5.5 requires Intel VT to execute 64-bit guests.[8] For 32-bit guests, use of VT is possible but not enabled by default because for normal workloads it's slower.[9][10]
    * Xen — Xen 3.0.2, open source (GPL) virtualization, uses Intel VT to execute unmodified guest operating systems. Both Intel and AMD have contributed support for their virtualization extensions to the Xen virtual machine monitor, allowing it to execute unmodified guest operating systems.