Virtual Iron and Intel FlexPriority Show Huge Virtualization Performance Gains

With the introduction of Intel’s new Quad-Core Xeon Processor 7300 series chips came a new technology from the company called Intel VT FlexPriority. It was designed to accelerate virtualization interrupt handling and thereby improve virtualization performance.

According to Virtual Iron Software, they are one of the first companies to take advantage of this new Intel technology. And because of that, Virtual Iron was able to recently announce extremely impressive results from a series of benchmarking tests performed using Intel’s vConsolidate against a Virtual Iron v4.0 environment.

Intel ran the tests and found that when using Intel VT FlexPriority on Virtual Iron, virtual servers benefited from up to 40% faster boot times and up to 35% performance improvements on 32-bit Windows guests. These numbers are quite compelling. So compelling that the findings were part of the opening day’s keynote at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that took place this month at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Steve Noyes, vice president of engineering at Virtual Iron Software said, “Virtual Iron 4.0 showed up to 167% performance improvement on the new Intel Xeon 7300 processor based servers, relative to previous offerings as measured by Intel’s vConsolidate benchmark.” He continued, “This new Intel VT extension allows our solution to avoid the common performance penalty these operating systems introduce when virtualized. This enables truly efficient SMP configurations of 32-bit guests to meet the demands of critical enterprise applications in a virtualized environment.”