Neterion, Intel, Red Hat Jointly Demonstrate Single Root I/O Virtualization Technology

Neterion, a California-based provider of I/O virtualization for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters, reportedly has demonstrated a new advanced I/O virtualization (IOV) technology, so called “Single Root I/O Virtualization” or “SR-IOV,” which will be leveraging Intel’s virtualization technology for directed I/O (Intel VT-d), Red Hat Enterprise Linux Release 5.4’s advanced virtualization capabilities, and company’s X3100 10GbE adapter.

 

Officials at Neterion said that the company partnered with Intel (News - Alert) as well as Red Hat, to develop a technology based on Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group I/O virtualization specifications.

 

Neterion along with its partners, Intel and RedHat, demonstrated this technology at the recent Intel Developers Forum (IDF) 2009 in San Francisco.

 

Earlier, server virtualization was focused on virtualizing a large number of under-utilized servers onto a single efficiently utilized physical server. But, it was practically not possible to virtualize I/O intensive applications, due to the fact that latency was too high a cost to pay to allow virtualization.

 

In this regard, Neterion, Intel and Red Hat (News - Alert) collaborated and integrated their platform, software, and hardware – Intel’s Xeon 5500 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization solution and X3100 10 GbE adapter – together, to build an end-to-end I/O virtualization solution stack, which could enable a virtual machine to deliver the throughput of 10GbE line rate with low latency compared to native (non-virtualized) OS systems.

 

Consequently, IT managers can leverage the new SR-IOV technology to achieve the agility and robustness that virtualization can deliver, even while running I/O intensive applications, in a virtualized environment.

 

“The I/O performance has become a major barrier for virtualization adoption in data centers for I/O intensive, latency sensitive workloads and enterprise tier one applications,” said Jim Pappas, director industry initiatives, Intel Corporation. “Our enabling focus with the industry and IHVs such as Neterion, is to remove this barrier through implementation of Intel VT-d and PCI-SIG SR-IOV to enable near native I/O performance for virtualized servers. Now that we have practically eliminated the virtualization performance penalty, every server in the data center can receive the benefits of being virtualized and data centers will become more efficient and green.”

 

Navin Thadani, senior director, virtualization business at Red Hat, said in a press release, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 provides a single deployment platform capable of running on virtual machines or stand alone servers or even on hosted clouds. This configuration independence allows IT managers to migrate applications more rapidly from native OS to fully virtualized environments to realize the benefits of virtualization enabled by advanced IOV technologies including SR-IOV.”

 

Thadani added: “Neterion’s Hypervisor Offload (Hy-O) capability in the X3100 series is a key element in the demonstration and shows that even I/O intensive applications can realize significant benefits from virtualization. An easier transition will help to break down barriers to virtualization adoption and to drive server virtualization in the data center.”