Intel and partners made a big launch noise about the new Xeon 5500 Series Processor (aka Nehalem) today, which included this online session that we've embedded below.
Anne Catambay presented from VMware's point of view, and I've excerpted a bit from a transcript of her talk here:
In the latest iteration of our product we have enhanced this capability even more and now offer Enhanced VMotion with Intel VT Flexmigration. The beauty of this combination is that you can now move these workloads between different Intel processor generations – expanding the pool of resources in your virtualized environment. If you are running older Intel processors in your datacenter and need to refresh them, you will be able to immediately migrate production application workloads to the new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series-based servers when they are rolled into the datacenter. …
VMware software also leverages the Xeon 5500’s performance enhancing feature – hyper-threading, which is a technology that doubles the number of threads each core can execute during a single clock cycle. This increases the number of Virtual machines you can run per socket – maximizing virtual machine density, and lowering your data center power footprint even farther. Another technology we take advantage of is Intel VT-d. When VT-d is combined with VMware VMDirectPath, we increase the performance of network intense applications running inside VMware virtual machines by providing the necessary address translation and isolation/protection for the software. This allows the virtual machine to directly interact with underlying physical network device and frees up the CPU to run additional tasks. This special use case minimizes hypervisor overhead and provides access to the full bandwidth of the IO device – a particularly interesting benefit as we move towards 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
