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If you are looking to improve your virtualized datacenter, 10Gb Ethernet really deserves your attention. It delivers more than twice as much bandwidth as quad-port gigabit, lower latency, lower power per gigabit, and the ability to greatly simplify your network infrastructure--especially with virtualized servers. 10GbE is a game changer for I/O virtualization; it is much more than "a bigger pipe" for your (virtualized) network traffic. That is the good news.
The bad news is that you have to take quite a few hurdles before I/O virtualization does it's magic. One bad decision and you end up with a power gobbling, CPU hogging monster. We gathered two modern 10GbE NICs, one from Solarflare and one from Neterion, and checked if they are really an improvement compared to the typical Intel 82598 NIC. This article is not a simple throughput and latency benchmarking review, but turned out to be a story about how virtualization technologies like VT-d, IOMMU, Netqueue, SR-IOV and I/O convergence can make sense in the modern datacenter.
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