Dell Combines Intel and Citrix Technologies in Its New Virtualization Offering

Dell, a provider of innovative technology and services, has demonstrated a new virtualization technology called Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) using technologies from Intel (News - Alert) and Citrix.

SR-IOV, according to Dell officials, is the industry first virtualization capability based on PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization specifications and Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d).

Sally Stevens, vice president Platform Marketing, Dell (News - Alert), said that the new virtualization technology will make a business impact for latency intensive applications like data mining, databases and stock trades.

“Companies will be able to take advantage of these boosts without incurring great costs as it works with existing investments in networking infrastructures and does not require additional networking switches and cables,” Stevens said.

Based on industry standards, SR-IOV helps improve virtualization performance across networked servers and storage and allows multiple operating systems to share a physical interconnect.

This new solution leverages  Intel VT-d and the Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) device with support for PCI-SIG SR-IOV specification to allow multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on Citrix XenServer in a Dell PowerEdgeR710 with Intel Xeon processor 5500 to directly share I/O devices.

The solution does not depend on the hypervisor technology. Instead, a single I/O hardware is subdivided logically to appear as 128 virtual network interface cards (NICs). Each NIC (News - Alert) is assigned independently and directly to a virtual machine to provide precise per-VM control for connection speed and quality of service.

According to officials, SR-IOV enables the most demanding database and transaction processing workloads to be virtualized with rock-solid performance. Use of 10GE reduces wiring cost and power consumption, and allows VMs to quickly boot and migrate between servers.

Equally important, multiple VM instances can now share full, direct access to 10GE hardware based networking. This allows the instantiation of VM instances per tenant or per application in cloud environments, each with guaranteed capacity.

Dell PowerEdge R710 server equipped with a SR-IOV enabled BIOS along with Citrix XenServer virtualization software is designed to use Intel VT-d and SR-IOV to remove I/O virtualization bottlenecks. In preliminary lab tests, this technology reduces processor utilization, increases bandwidth to virtual machines and improves data transfer rates across the network.

SR-IOV technology also cuts hardware costs by reducing the number of physical network cards, cables, and switch ports required in a virtualization environment to connect storage and servers. Since it works with existing 10GE switches from multiple vendors, it does not require proprietary switching infrastructure.

Dell recently announced it is acquiring computer services provider Perot Systems for roughly $3.9 billion, TMCnet reported. With this acquisition, Dell plans to expand its enterprise solutions capabilities.