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nonot1
Asked: 2011-03-24 10:32:10 +0800 CST

Intel NIC: VMDc or VMDq?

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I need to buy a nic that I want to eventually (~3 months) re-use for a VM server deployment that will need to support heavy network I/O. Server is a Xeon Gulftown/Westmere-EP.

Intel has server NICs that support VMDc, VMDq, or both.

Which is the difference?

Which do I want? They both seem to deal with the problem of doing per-VM segmentation at the NIC level, but I don't know which technology better.

See VMDc: http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/solutions/vmdc.htm

See VMDq: http://blogs.intel.com/idf/2008/08/vmdq_and_vmware_netqueue_will.php?wapkw=(vmdq)

Thank you

xen intel-vt-x vmware-esxi gigabit-ethernet intel

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    VMDc is for assigning a single VM its own personal NIC, which breaks all the fun stuff of VMs like live migrations.

    VMDq is an extension of processing offload and buffering, often called NetQueue. Go ahead and get that, though it's not going to be a huge boost unless you have some major workloads on the NICs.

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