vSphere 4.0 introduces a new para-virtualized network device - VMXNET3.  We recently published a paper demonstrating its performance characteristics, compared to that of enhanced VMXNET2 (the previous generation of high performance virtual network device from VMware).Some highlights of this paper are:(1) Throughput gains of up to 92% for 10G TCP/IPv4 Rx workloads with large socket buffer, which greatly improves bulk data transfer performance in a data center environment.(2) Dramatic gains across all configurations of IPv6 traffic, with significant CPU usage reduction and throughput [..]