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Heads Up - Performance Impact with VMware Workstation on Windows 11 with Intel Hybrid CPUs

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There have been some recent reports from users observing performance issues when running VMware Workstation on Windows 11 along with using recent Intel (12th Gen and later) Hybrid CPUs, which introduces a new hybrid big.LITTLE architecture for Intel's x86 consumer CPUs.

This new Intel Hybrid CPU contains two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die, which follows a similar design to Apple Silicon CPUs. For information about the new Intel hybrid Intel CPUs, check out this resource HERE.

At first glance, most users had assumed this was due to Virtual Machines being scheduled to run on the less powerful E-Cores, this was problematic even for non-VMware use cases and with the recent introduction of Intel Thread Director, this was supposed to have been improved with Windows 11.

However, after some internal testing, the Intel Hybrid CPU may not actually be the culprit.

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Quick Tip - Retry VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment with modified bringup spec

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During a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) bringup, where VMware Cloud Builder is performing deploying the VCF Management Domain, unforeseen issues can occur. Within the Cloud Builder UI or API, if a particular task had failed, you can easily retry the deployment without having to start all over again, which is certainly something I have benefited more than once!

When you retry the bringup workflow, it is using the original bringup specification which from the Cloud Builder UI can either be the VCF Deployment Workbook (XLS) or VCF Deployment Spec (JSON), which is to be expected as you are attempting to retry the exact same deployment.

However, in some cases you might need to adjust the bringup specification or if you made a typo but this is typically not allowed during a retry operation and would require a complete re-deployment. While deploying the newest VCF 5.1 release, I was testing out a new deployment scenario where I needed to append additional entries into the VCF Deployment JSON spec and I came to learn from one of our Engineers that I did not have to blow away the setup, but that I could retry using a modified bringup spec when using the Cloud Builder API!

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ESXi support for Intel iGPU with SR-IOV

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Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) was first introduced back in 2012 with the release of vSphere 5.1 and enables for a physical PCIe device to be shared amongst a number of Virtual Machines. The networking industry was the first to take advantage of the SR-IOV technology and could be used to help reduce latencies and improve overall CPU efficiencies for vSphere-based workloads that were network intensive.

Since SR-IOV is an extension of the PCIe specification, it can also be used benefit other non-networking devices. In 2016, AMD introduced their MxGPU technology which added SR-IOV capabilities to their GPUs which was then used to power VMware Horizon workloads, but this functionality was only available during the vSphere 6.0 and 6.5 release.

GPU sharing these days are synonymous to one vendor, NVIDIA. In 2015, VMware and NVIDIA teamed up to accelerate Enterprise desktop workloads through the integration of NVIDIA's vGPU (formally GRID) technology with the release of both VMware Horizon View and vSphere 6.0.

NVIDIA continues to dominate the GPU market in 2023, however another vendor has re-entered the market with an interesting solution that is enabled by the latest vSphere 8.0 Update 2 release ...

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