aventuracu, I see what you're asking. In the beginning I was thinking you probably refer to the usual CPU features in general (VT-x) because nobody usually worries about VT-D.
But I understand now that you wanted to know if VT-D in particular is going to be a problem.
Like Chakraem and JoshuaAndrews said, I can also confirm that you shouldn't worry about VT-D. My motherboard (ASUS P8P67 Deluxe) also does not support VT-D and vMotion,HA,DRS, etc. all work perfectly in my virtual lab. VT-x/EPT (or AMD-V/RVI) is really all that you should make sure you have (and as you said most motherboards have support out of the box).
VMware's documentation is also clear; what you get with VT-D is esentially a performance improvement for certain workloads, you will not miss out on important functionality:
"
vSphere DirectPath I/O leverages Intel VT-d and AMD-Vi hardware support (described in
“Hardware-Assisted I/O MMU Virtualization (VT-d and AMD-Vi)” on page 10) to allow guest operating
systems to directly access hardware devices.
"
"
Typical virtual machines and their workloads don't require the use of DirectPath I/O. For workloads that are
very networking intensive and don't need the core virtualization features mentioned above, however,
DirectPath I/O might be useful to reduce CPU usage.
"
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf (chapter 2 page 35)
Further, I have recently purchased a copy Brian Atkinson's excellent VCP550 Study Guide and I have not seen any mention of VT-D in it. But the guide does explicitly mention you need to enable Intel VT-x (or AMD-RVI) for Fault Tolerance and 64bit VMs.
Without VT-D you're only missing out an a potential performance increase.
--
VR Bitman | http://virtualis.info | vSphere 5.5 Guide: http://goo.gl/QUqTH7
VMware professional, virtualization & FOSS evangelist, informatician, geek
VCA-Cloud, VCA-WM, VCA-DCV, VCP-DCV
