Introduction:

IT organizations are taking advantage of virtualization to consolidate server infrastructure, reduce power, cooling and management costs, and provide simpler and more affordable solutions for high availability, load balancing and disaster recovery. Servers based on multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) help to magnify the benefits of virtualization, by enabling higher consolidation ratios and better application performance.

Recent enhancements to Intel VT are directed at solving the next virtualization challenge: delivering fast and scalable I/O bandwidth for virtualized servers. These new technologies can help IT organizations further increase consolidation ratios, virtualize a wider range of applications, and manage workloads more effectively. They also provide a necessary prerequisite for next-generation cloud computing models, which will ultimately deliver another major leap in data center efficiency through enhanced automation and more dynamic control of hardware and software assets.