• Separation of I/O resources — providing management independence.
• Consolidation of the I/O resources into pools — increasing the utilization, saving cost, power and space.
• Virtualization — emulating the original I/O functions as "virtual" functions to avoid software disruption.

Virtensys VIO-4000 series of I/O Virtualization appliances remove physical I/O adapters from servers, leaving the servers as pure compute and memory engines. These resources are pooled and consolidated within the VIO-4000 appliance which creates a virtual image of each of the I/O adapter (virtual adapter) that is presented to each server. The virtual adapter exactly emulates the physical adapter and thus requires no changes to the server, OS, application or device driver.

The VIO-4000 appliance shares physical adapters and dynamically allocate them across many physical servers with no loss of throughput. The VIO-4000 appliance connects to each server using a single PCI Express® (PCIe) cable that connects directly to the server native PCIe bus, thus removing the need to deploy any new network in the data center. The PCIe cable replaces the multiple network and storage cables per server that were required in traditional I/O deployments. The VIO-4000 appliance eliminates the network and storage access layer switches as these switching functions are performed by the VIO-4000 appliance.