Today, the kvm developers hit another milestone achievement by achieving native network IO performance using pci passthrough with VT-d technology. This is noteworthy because the major sources of contention for virtual machines are disk and network IO. This technology will have a major impact on the industry. A quote from the development mailing list follows:

Ben-Ami Yassour wrote:

In last few tests that we made with PCI-passthrough and VT-d using iperf, we were able to get the same throughput as on native OS with a 1G NIC

The rest of the thread from the development mailing list can be read here

How will this change things?

Greater adoption of virtualization. Certain workloads were traditionally not virtualized due to the contention issues mentioned above; they were not considered good candidates for virtualization. This technology will allow network intensive applications to be accepted as good candidates for virtual machines and in turn increase the adoption rate of virtualization. This, of course, is good for the industry as a whole.

It is also worth mentioning that the chip makers are playing a major role here; in this case VT-d is intel technology. AMD has similar technology called IOMMU. This just solidifies the point I made in another post here about the impact the chipmakers will have on virtualization.

It should also be noted that there are still some minor issues to be ironed out before these patches are production ready.

Please post comments on how you think this will impact the server virtulaization industry. Will this affect the way you adopt server virtualization?