General ESXi 4.1 VMCI question

[Sly]

I am running multiple hosts with ESX 4.0 classic and ESXi 4.1 and have VMCI turned off for all VMs. Has anyone seen that turning on VMCI improves virtual machine performance in the case when there is not a requirement for two VMs to communicate directly with one another?

I see that VMCI is supposed to improve performance between the VM and the host hypervisor, which is why I ask. For this question I am not concerned about any security implications turning on VMCI may have.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I haven't tested it, but I wouldn't expect an improvement unless the apps in the VMs were updated to support VMCI sockets. That would also apply to host / VM operations. What aspects of host to VM communication have you seen improvements in?




Dave

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[Sly]

I haven't tried this yet and do not know that much about VMCI. I see that it is meant to improve VM to VM communication as well as VM to hypervisor communication, so I was wondering if turning this on would improve the performance of the VM itself or if this really only meant to improve inter-VM communication performance.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

It would only improve performance after applications were updated to use VMCI sockets (instead of a virtual NIC and TCP/IP).




Dave

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