VMware VMTN's John Troyer is out at Intel IDF and reporting on VMDq and VMware Netqueue, talking about how it provides high speed and low latecy (a great combination) for your virtual 10GbE NICs.
He writes:
Here are some things you should know about Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) from Intel and Netqueue from VMware:
- VMDq is the base technology, Netqueue is the software feature baked into VMware ESX.
- You need this if you want to take advantage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in your virtual machines. Without it, you max out at about 3-4 Gb. With Netqueue, Shefali was showing ESX with throughput of 9.3-9.4 Gb.
- It offloads the work that ESX has to do to route packets to virtual machines, so using Netqueue frees up CPU and reduces latency.
- This is a technology that runs down on the Ethernet controller hardware and exists today, so you don’t need to wait for Nehalem.
- Netqueue is supported on VMware ESX 3.5 Updates 1 and 2.
And offers the following video explanation from Intel’s Shefali Chinni.