Intel is also building a better physical platform with unique hardware-assist features to enhance the virtual data center and help tame server sprawl. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, built on Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem, expands the benefits of virtualization with innovations that boost performance, increase consolidation ratios, and enable servers of different generations to be combined in the same virtualized server pool, improving virtual machine failover, load balancing, and disaster recovery capabilities.
The new Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem, with next-generation Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) enhances virtualization performance by up to 2.1x and reduces roundtrip virtualization latency by up to 40 percent.
• Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT-x) continues to offer investment protection and infrastructure flexibility with multi-generation VM migration across the full range of 32-bit and 64-bit configurations, enabling bigger VM pools.
• Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel VT-c) provides hardware-assisted I/O that accelerates network performance and simplifies VM migration.
• Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) helps speed data movement and eliminates much of the performance overhead by giving designated VMs their own dedicated I/O devices, reducing the overhead of the VM migration in managing I/O traffic.