Announced more than one year ago by Intel, Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) is a new technology powering 10GB Ethernet cards (Intel 82575 and Intel 82598) specifically designed for virtualization.
VMDq is part of the Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (VT-c) along with I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).
More generically, it’s defined as a I/O Virtualization technology.
VMDq handles parallel queues of packets, routing them to the correct virtual machines at chipset level and offloading the hypervisor.
This reduces the network latency and frees up the CPU.
The technology is being supported in several hypervisors. VMware ESX 3.5 already has it since Update 1.
Shefali Chinni, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intel, describes how it boosts the ESX network performance:
Thanks to VMTN for the news.