VTune on VMWare???

[bobphillips]

The IT department at work has caught the VMWare religion, and loves virtual servers to the point where one really has to justify the purchase of a real piece of hardware.

We would like to use VTune, and dedicating a box to it would seem to be a good idea (wouldn't want my websurfing to skew performance numbers). IT would like to know why this dedicated box couldn't be a virtual one.

We could go around and around on this one, but clearly the fastest resolution to our political issue would be an authoritative statement from someone on the VTune team that using VTune on a VMWare virtual PC is/is-not supported/recommended.

Would it be possible for someone on the VTune team to provide such a statement? One could construe the hardware requirements on the VTune web page to be a definitive statement of hardware needs, but a VMWare proponent might consider emulated hardware to satisfy those criteria.

Thanks,
Bob Phillips

[David_A_Intel1]

Hi Bob!

Thanks for a great question! I think this has been said before, but I will say it here: VMware* is definitely NOT supported by the VTune analyzer. Really, it's a shortcoming of VMware, since it does not virtualize the processor control registers and this is how the VTune analyzer collects sampling data.

Having said that, I believe you can still install the VTune analyzer and use Call Graph under VMware. You can always download an eval version and try it out!

Thanks,

[infohunter]

This is very helpful! Many thanks!

[JamesR]

VMware now supports profiling (VTune); http://tinyurl.com/vmwarevtune

[James_M_]

As of yesterday the release notes for the latest version read, "EBS analysis within a virtual machine is supported only in VMware Fusion* 5 virtual environment."

But I see only VMware Fusion 7 easily available for purchase.

Is it safe to assume that VMware versions newer than Fusion 5 are probably also usable?

[David_A_Intel1]

"Safe?"  I guess that depends on your application of that word. ;)

But, seriously, we do not do any validation on VMware systems.  They enabled PMU virtualization in Fusion* 5.  Unless they had some reason to remove it, I would assume it is still there.  However, the only real way to know is to try it! :)  Do you have Fusion 7 installed already?

[bouache]

What about Intel VTune Amplifier on OpenStack VMs? is the VM supported by VTune?

Thanks

[David_A_Intel1]

Hi Mourad:

VTune Amplifier does not do anything to "support" any VMs.  VMs must enabled VTune Amplifier by giving unrestricted access to the PMU registers: either virtualized or direct.  I'm sorry, but the only way to know if VTune Amplifier's hardware-based sampling works or not (software-based sampling will always work), is to try it.  If the driver can't access the PMU registers, you will get a message that there is a problem with the driver and hardware-based sampling is unavailable.

[Bernard]

The question is  VM virtualize the real underlying CPU PMU registers?

[Max_C_]

Hi  all

We can use hardware-event based sampling in our virtual environment(openstack based on KVM).

Now we concern about its data accuracy.

Does it mean that if we can collect the result(no PMU error), the date is accuracy?

Thanks

Max

[Bernard]

It probably depends on the type of PMU counters. I mean if VTune driver is able to access real physical counters then it must bypass virtual environment and executed in host OS environment. Another possibility is to access virtualized PMU counters so I think in this case result will not be accurate.