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oliver_heinz
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Does Vsphere 6.0 support VMCS Shadowing?

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

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admin
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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.

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admin
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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.

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lamw
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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

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admin
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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

admin
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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.

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