Tool suite eases deployment of virtual servers

Exar Corp. introduces a suite of management tools for its Neterion X3100 family of 10GbE adapters running with VMware ESX 4.1. The management suite enables VMware users to configure Exar's advanced I/O virtualization features, allowing fast, easy deployment and management of virtual servers, enabling dramatic reduction in total cost of ownership.

The tool suite for the X3110 single port and X3120 dual port network interface cards (NICs) provides a user friendly management interface. From the new management interface, customers can enable, per virtual interface, dynamic bandwidth allocation and assignment of QoS priorities. This management feature allows virtual servers to provision resources in real time to meet changing networking requirements. Network statistics can be viewed independently for each virtual interface and each interface can be reset independently, providing complete channel isolation and resource independence for each guest. In addition, all virtual path statistics can be viewed from a single interface, enabling centralized management for all guests.

The suite complements the hardware architecture of the X3100 family, which supports up to seventeen independent virtual interfaces. Each virtual interface has the dedicated hardware resources of a complete NIC and includes multiple stateless hypervisor and protocol offloads for maximum CPU performance. The X3100 offers ESX users hardware-based enforcement of service levels that guarantees bandwidth and QoS requirements, and enables near native I/O performance for guests, all while preserving the efficiency and cost reduction of a virtualized environment.

The management tool suite for the X3100 family running with ESX 4.1 may be downloaded for free from the company's website.