PCI-SIG Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Support in Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity: Efficient Native Sharing of I/O Devices With Virtual Machines for Enhancing I/O Performance

As virtualized server deployment increases, virtualization technologies continue to evolve especially in the area of I/O performance. Within the industry, significant effort has been expended to increase the effectiveness of hardware resource utilization (i.e., application execution) through the use of virtualization technologies. The Single Root I/O Virtualization and Sharing Specification (SR-IOV) defines extensions to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification suite to enable multiple System Images (SI) or Virtual Machines (VMs/Guests) in the virtualized environment to share PCI hardware resources.