Introduction

Device and I/O virtualization involves managing the routing of I/O requests between virtual devices and the shared physical hardware. Software-based I/O virtualization and management, in contrast to a direct pass through to the hardware, enables a rich set of features and simplified management. With networking, virtual NICs and virtual switches create virtual networks between virtual machines which are running on the same host without the network traffic consuming bandwidth on the physical network.

NIC teaming consists of multiple, physical NICs and provides failover and load balancing for virtual machines. Virtual machines can be seamlessly relocated to different systems by using VMware vMotion, while keeping their existing MAC addresses and the running state of the VM. The key to effective I/O virtualization is to preserve these virtualization benefits while keeping the added CPU overhead to a minimum.

The hypervisor virtualizes the physical hardware and presents each virtual...