Hardware Based I/O Virtualization Technologies for Hypervisors, Configurations and Advantages - A Study

IT organizations are taking advantage of virtualization to consolidate server infrastructure, reduce power consumption, cooling and management costs, and provide simpler and more affordable solutions for high availability, load balancing and disaster recovery [1]. One of the challenges with Virtualization Technology today is: delivering fast and scalable I/O bandwidth for virtualized servers. This paper will present various native I/O virtualization technologies (SRIOV, MRIOV and other proprietary ones) and describe how they will address the challenges presented by Server Virtualization. These emerging Hardware based I/O technologies can help IT organizations further increase consolidation ratios, virtualize a wider range of applications, and manage workloads more effectively by providing near to direct I/O access Performance as the I/O path length is comparable to a dedicated adapter assigned to a VM. . They also provide a necessary prerequisite for next-generation cloud computing models, which will ultimately deliver another major leap in data center efficiency through dynamic control of hardware. At the end, this paper will evaluate the advantages, limitations of native I/O Virtualization technologies.