Introducing the virtual machine monitor
The virtual machine monitor (VMM) process runs in the VMkernel and consists of the vCPU and the memory management unit (MMU). This VMM is responsible for the virtualization of the guest OS instructions and managing memory. The VMM also passes storage and network I/O requests to the VMkernel while passing all other requests to the Virtual Machine Executable (VMX) process. The combination of techniques used to virtualize the instruction set and memory is known as the monitor mode.
Understanding monitor modes
The VMM can implement the monitor mode with software techniques, hardware techniques, or a combination of both. ESXi can automatically determine whether virtual machines should use hardware support for virtualization based on the processor type and the virtual machine. The virtualization technology is a common feature of modern processors. However, there are some use cases for specific workloads where overriding the automatic selection can provide...
