Server virtualization is helping IT organizations improve data center productivity in fundamental ways. It lets you consolidate multiple operating systems and applications per physical server, reducing the size and costs of your IT infrastructure, while enabling you to deploy new applications in minutes. Virtualization also lets you move running applications from one server to another without downtime, for flexible workload management, high availability during planned maintenance or unplanned events. Investment in virtualization solutions is an intelligent business decision: the benefits in utilization, energy savings, manageability, service levels and cost models can be dramatic.

To gain full value of virtualization, you need servers that are built to handle the heavy and ever-changing demands of a virtualized and consolidated computing environment. To help you get maximum benefits from virtualization, Intel has built a better physical server platform with unique hardware-assist features to enhance the virtual data center. The Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series is the first of this new generation of server platforms built with higher I/O bandwidth for higher virtualization performance plus multi-generation VM migration for unparalleled flexibility in virtualized environments. Next-generation Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) enhances native virtualization performance by up to 2.1x and reduces roundtrip virtualization latency by up to 40 percent with hardware-enhanced technologies built into Intel® processor, chipset, and network adapter.