feature: The Ars Technica Guide to I/O Virtualization

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn't be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based web applications.

Even though it has been used pervasively in datacenters for the past few years, virtualization isn't standing still. Rather, the technology is still evolving, and with the launch of I/O virtualization support from Intel and AMD it's poised to reach new levels of performance and flexibility. Our past virtualization coverage looked at the basics of what virtualization is, and how processors are virtualized. The current installment will take a close look at how I/O virtualization is used to boost the performance of individual servers by better virtualizing parts of the machine besides the CPU.