Saturday, March 8, 2008

Intel 10Gbit Nic with VMDq doubles Vmware IO performance

In order to help the I/O congestion associated with the additional VMM software switching in a virtualized environment, Intel has implemented a technology called VMDq in their latest 10Gbit Ethernet NICs and silicon. VMDq is a technology specifically designed to offload some of the switching that was done in the VMM to networking hardware specifically designed for this function. This drastically reduces the overhead associated with I/O switching in the VMM which greatly improves throughput and overall system performance.

Without VMDq, the throughput was 4.0 Gbps; with VMDq, the throughput more than doubled to 9.2 Gbps.