aes-ni on esxi

[scotty do]

I'm looking to encrypt my FS volume with either luks or truecrypt. Will the VM be able to take advantage of AES-NI support from the CPU? I'm trying to keep the overhead to a minimum on a ESX test box, while keeping power to a minimum as well.

 

[haileris]

I'm *guessing* not, since all the recent VMware release notes that mention AES-NI pertain to the VMware workstation product. Could be wrong though!

 

[Loto_Bak]

These intel slides say otherwise.
A couple other forums indicate that esx supports aes-ni in the guests but hyper-v does not

http://www.intel.com/technology/security/downloads/AES-NI_ecosystem.pdf

 

[madcoder]

I have tried it with Truecrypt on a Sandy Bridge Xeon with a vSphere 4.1 U1 host with a Windows 7 VM, and can confirm, it definitely works. It benchmarked at 1.2GB/second with Truecrypt, using a virtual machine with only 2 cores. This is inline with some bare metal benchmarks I read about where all 4 cores got about twice that.

 

[madcoder]

For reference...