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, we quantify 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 while VM encryption can lead to bottlenecks in I/O throughput and latency for ultra-high-performance devices (like a high-end NVMe drive) that can support hundreds of thousands of IOPS, for most regular types of storage, like enterprise class SSD or vSAN, the impact on I/O performance is very minimal.