Understanding Hardware-Assisted Virtualization

Summary

Hardware-assisted virtualization enables hypervisors to be smaller in size and more efficient when running virtual machine workloads -- compared to software-only solutions. This type of virtualization comes with the tradeoff of high CPU utilization, which impacts performance. However, the newest CPUs are significantly more efficient than their predecessors and utilization has dropped. This results in increased virtual machine performance and higher virtual machine densities per host system.

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