How critical is the support of Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O when working with VMWare?

Question

VMware

There are two laptops - a candidate for purchase: with cpu i5-4250U and with i5-4200U. The first has support for VT-d, the second does not. Will there be a significant difference when working with virtual machines under VMWare (mainly OS X and server Windows), for example, increased % cpu utilization for the second case. As a host - Windows 7/8 x64.

Answer 1

Performance in any case will be close to the host. The main thing is to have VT-x.
VT-d (IOMMU) allows you to forward a pci device inside a virtual machine, but workstation cannot do this. I'm not even sure that under Windows, in principle, there is a working solution.
As for the laptop, to work with vt-d you need:
1. The presence of the vt-d module in the processor
2. Support for this module by the motherboard
3. The ability to enable IOMMU in the BIOS
4. Support in the OS
5. Support in the hypervisor
So it may turn out that there is an iommu module in the processor, but the laptop itself does not support it.