I think this was understood by the original poster, however don't be so 
quick to discount Binary Translation. If you have an older processor 
with the early versions of the VT extensions, they're unlikely to get 
used as they perform worse than Binary Translation on a platform that 
advanced it well (e.g. VMware). Even on the newest processors, Binary 
Translation is used to handle some scenarios as the VT extensions can't 
support them.

The biggest gains from VT extensions have been in the context switching 
arena and those gains are further increased on the vSphere platform. If 
you keep the number of VMs and vCPUs minimal in proportion to the number 
of physical CPUs, you shouldn't see too much of a performance impact as 
the frequency of context switching should minimized (still quite a lot, 
but normal) as a result.

On 1/21/2011 8:32 AM, Patrick "Finn" Robins wrote:
> I have to second that. Virtualization on a CPU without the VT 
> extensions is a big performance hit.
>
>
> -Patrick "Finn" Robins
>
> -- 
> Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't 
> matter and those who matter don't mind.
>   - Dr. Seuss
>
>
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