As I'm lately educating myself in field of Virtualziation and Virtual Machines, the interesting question poped up What is Virtualization on a Hardware Level and what are Intel's and AMD technologies supporting it?
- Intel Virtualialization (Vt-x)
Is Intel's hardware assistance for processors running virtualization platforms. Intel's Virtualization for short is know as VT-x. Intel VT-x extensions are probably the best recognized extensions, adding migration, priority and memory handling capabilities to a wide range of Intel processors.
Intel VT includes series of extensions for hardware virtualization adding virtualization support to Intel chipsets, so that Virtual Machines could assign specific I/O Devices. Intel VT includes a series of extensions for hardware virtualization Intel Virtualization is better described here.
- AMD-V (AMD virtualization)
Is a set of hardware extensions for the X86 processor architecture. Advanced Micro Dynamics (AMD) designed the extensions to perform repetitive tasks normally performed by software and improve resource use and virtual machine (VM) performance. Early virtualization efforts relied on software emulation to replace hardware functionality. But software emulation can be a slow and inefficient process. Because many virtualization tasks were handled through software, VM behavior and resource control were often poor, resulting in unacceptable VM performance on the server. AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology was first announced in 2004 and added to AMD's Pacifica 64-bit x86 processor designs. By 2006, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors appeared with AMD-V technology, and today, the technology is available on Turion 64 X2, second- and third-generation Opteron, Phenom and Phenom II processors. Just like with Intel Virtualization AMD-V Technology enables extra hardware support for assignment of specifics I/O on per virtualized OS. AMD V Virtualization is described more thoroughly here