Georgia Lyman works as a cloud security engineer in a multinational company.

Virtual servers can face performance limitations due to the overhead introduced by the hypervisor in a virtualized environment. To improve data transfer performance and communication between virtual servers, Georgia can eliminate the data transfer capacity thresholds by allowing the virtual server to bypass the hypervisor and directly access the I/O card of the physical server. This technique is known as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), which allows virtual machines to directly access network interfaces, thereby reducing latency and improving throughput.

Understanding SR-IOV: SR-IOV enables a network interface card (NIC) to appear as multiple separate physical devices to the virtual machines, allowing them to bypass the hypervisor.

Performance Benefits: By bypassing the hypervisor, the virtual server can achieve near-native performance for network I/O, eliminating bottlenecks and improving data transfer rates.

Implementation: This requires hardware support for SR-IOV and appropriate configuration in the hypervisor and virtual machines.

References

VMware SR-IOV

Intel SR-IOV Overview