What is I/O Virtualization?
I/O Virtualization (IOV) consists of three distinct steps: • Separation of I/O resources — providing management independence. • Consolidation of the I/O resources into pools — increasing the utilization, saving cost, power and space. • Virtualization — emulating the original I/O functions as “virtual” functions to avoid software disruption. Virtensys VIO-4000 series of I/O Virtualization switches remove physical I/O adapters from servers, leaving the servers as pure compute and memory engines. These resources are pooled and consolidated within the VIO-4000 switches which create a virtual image of each of the I/O adapter (virtual adapter) that is presented to each server. The virtual adaptor exactly emulates the physical adaptor and thus requires no changes to the server, OS, application or device driver. The VIO-4000 switches share physical adapters and dynamically allocate them across many physical servers with no loss of throughput. The VIO-4000 switch connects to each server using a
