I cannot find any information about VMCS shadowing in vSphere 6.0 release notes or white papers. Does someone know whether it is supported or not?
TIA,
Oliver
Yes, it is. However, for VMware products as guest hypervisors, we expect it to provide little to no benefit. We already avoid many VM-exits due to VMREAD/VMWRITE by clustering these operations together (https://labs.vmware.com/academic/publications/software-techniques). For other guest hypervisors that don't arrange their VMREAD/VMWRITE operations to be virtualization-friendly, VMCS shadowing should provide some benefit. The benefits will vary depending on the number of VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per nested VM-exit. A guest hypervisor like Hyper-V, which performs very few VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per VM-exit, will see little benefit. A guest hypervisor like VirtualBox, which performs quite a few VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per VM-exit, will see a greater benefit.
Yes, it is. However, for VMware products as guest hypervisors, we expect it to provide little to no benefit. We already avoid many VM-exits due to VMREAD/VMWRITE by clustering these operations together (https://labs.vmware.com/academic/publications/software-techniques). For other guest hypervisors that don't arrange their VMREAD/VMWRITE operations to be virtualization-friendly, VMCS shadowing should provide some benefit. The benefits will vary depending on the number of VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per nested VM-exit. A guest hypervisor like Hyper-V, which performs very few VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per VM-exit, will see little benefit. A guest hypervisor like VirtualBox, which performs quite a few VMREAD/VMWRITE operations per VM-exit, will see a greater benefit.
This is also described in my blog post (with the help from Jim) http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/06/will-intels-vmcs-shadowing-feature.html
By the way, for those interested in measuring the performance benefits, VMCS shadowing can be disabled with the following configuration option:
monitor_control.disable_vmcs_shadow = TRUE
Also, if you have questions regarding the VT-x or AMD-V features implemented in ESXi, see ESX(i) Support of Intel VT-x and AMD-V Features.