vSphere 6.5 Virtual Machine Encryption Performance

VMware vSphere virtual machine encryption (VM encryption) is a feature introduced in vSphere 6.5 to enable the encryption of virtual machines. VM encryption provides security to VMDK data by encrypting I/Os from a virtual machine (which has the VM encryption feature enabled) before it gets stored in the VMDK.


In this paper, VMware quantifies the impact of using VM encryption on a VM’s I/O performance as well as on some of the VM provisioning operations like VM clone, power-on, and snapshot creation. We show that, for most regular types of storage, like enterprise class SSD or vSAN, the impact on I/O performance is very minimal.