I also use Parallels on my Mac, and it has VT enabled for 32-bit as well. It there a reason why VT is only enabled for 64-bit on VMware Server ?

Is there a paid version of VMware Server that runs 32-bit guest OS with VT enabled?

I am running VMware Server on a Core2Duo E6300 (with VT according to Intel) and with Fedora FC5 x86_64, i.e. operating in 64 bit mode. Since VMware Server is a 32-bit 'application', am I right to say that this is one reason why it is not able to run 32-bit leveraging VT?

Hi,

Thanks for the pointer. The article is very enlighthening. I speed read it and plan to slow-digest it next couple of days

I notice that I/O are very expensive on VT (current implementation in the least). However, given that most of the modern peripherals are capable of memory I/O, especially those disk controllers (e.g SCSI), is it not true that as long as any virtual device driver keep to using memory I/O once the initial set up is done, we can avoid a lot of the penalty from I/O on a VT based virtualization ? The point here is that the benchmark is enlighthening, but in practical usage, will any those penalty be suffered ?

One thing for sure, the close to native graphic intensive performance does explain why I observe that running windows on VT enabled do feel faster. On a desktop, it matters, but for servers, I agree it does not matter.

I have this suggeston : Why don't VMware VMM do some form of instrumentation on-the-fly, keep simple counters on those expensive VT instructions, allow the VMM to switch from VT enabled to pure software virtualization.

Thanks.

p/s:

Note that I did not failed to run 64-bit guest, but was trying to know how to verify that the guest is in VT mode (beside spendign a lot of time doing benchmarks to tell).

Message was edited by:
kawika