Intel Virtual Technology for Connectivity

Technology Brief
Telecom and Compute Products
Intel® Virtualization Technology
for Connectivity
he growing adoption of virtualization in the datacenter enables a
more efcient use of server resources that have historically left
compute power underutilized by the model of running a single ap-
plication on a physical server. With server performance scaling by
a factor of ten in the last decade, the opportunity to consolidate
multiple applications on one server utilizing virtualized resource
management has created a more cost-effective alternative for
datacenter deployments.
Today’s virtualization-enabled datacenter solutions also enable
exible allocation of resources to handle unexpected changes in
required workloads. With these tools, many IT organizations have
lowered both capital and operational costs associated with server
hardware, while simultaneously improving datacenter agility. The
rapid adoption of virtualization-enabled servers has also created
a major increase in I/O overhead affecting the overall server per-
formance. Hence, a balanced platform approach that addresses
virtualization enhancements with hardware assists even at the I/O
and networking device level is essential.
Intel® Virtualization Technology
Intel has addressed the rise in virtualization demand by creating
Intel® Virtualization Technology1 (Intel® VT for Connectivity), a
suite of powerful enhancements to Intel® processors, chipsets, and
I/O devices enabling hardware-assisted virtualization support from
the core platform architecture. The hardware assists that Intel VT
provides to the virtualization software helps hypervisor providers
to deliver more simple and robust code, decreasing software over-
head and its potential impact to solution performance.
Intel VT comprises:
• Intel® Virtualization Technology for IA-32, Intel® 64 Architecture
2
and Itanium® processors (Intel® VT-x and Intel® VT-i)
• Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O
• Intel® Virtualization Technology for Connectivity
Introducing Intel® Virtualization
Technology for Connectivity
Intel’s latest addition to its suite of virtualization technologies
is Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel® VT for
Connectivity). This new collection of I/O virtualization technologies
improves overall system performance by improving communication
between host CPU and I/O devices within the virtual server.
This enables a lowering of CPU utilization, a reduction of system
latency and improved networking and I/O throughput. Intel VT for
Connectivity includes:
• Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)
• Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology
• Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) implementation
in Intel® devices
Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)
In today’s traditional virtualization implementation, hypervisor
abstracts the I/O device and shares that hardware resource with
multiple virtual machines. To route the packets coming from that
shared I/O device, hypervisor sorts the incoming packets based
on the destined virtual machine and then delivers the packets
accordingly. This sorting and grouping done in the hypervisor
consumes CPU cycles, thereby impacting the overall virtual
server performance.
The Intel Advantage: Virtualization Innovation
Intel® VT for Directed I/O (Chipset)
Reliability and security through device isolation
I/O performance with direct assignment
Intel® VT-x/VT-i (Processor)
Hardware assists for robust and simpler virtualization
Intel® VT FlexMigration
Protect IT investment and maximize flexibility
Quad-Core (Processor)
Unrivaled energy-efficient native performance
Intel® VT for Connectivity (Device)
NIC enhancement with VMDq
Network performance increase and reduced CPU utilization
Virtualized I/O with VMDc
Improved performance with flexibility, mobility, and data isolation
Processor
Chipset
Network