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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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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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Troubleshooting ESXi Shutting down firmware services and UEFI Runtime Services (RTS) error message

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Several months back, I was helping a customer debug an issue where I needed to install the GA release of ESXi 6.7! Yikes, it certainly has been a minute since I have installed anything older than 7.x but I figured it should still work fine with recent hardware like an Intel NUC systems, right?

After the ESXi installer started to boot up, it eventually halted with the following message:

Shutting down firmware services...

Using 'simple offset' UEFI RTS mapping policy


I decided to give it one more go by using a more recent release of ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and to my surprise, not only did ESXi installed perfectly fine but I did not run into the error message shown abvove!

I then realized that perhaps this has something to do with the ESXi bootloader, like any piece of software, there are fixes and enhancements with newer releases. I also recall a conversation with one of our Engineers that the ESXi bootloader is also designed to be backwards compatible, so that gave me an idea to try replacing the default ESXi 6.7 GA bootloader files with the ones found in ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and now I was able to install ESXi 6.7 GA release!

However, my success did not last very long as I ran into a slightly different message after the initial reboot:

Shutting down firmware services…

UEFI runtime services support is disabled

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