Business growth invariably demands IT infrastructure growth. Servers are often added to support new applications, which in turn can lead to many under-utilized servers, higher network management costs, and decreased agility and reliability.

Virtualization reduces server proliferation, simplifies server management, and significantly improves server utilization, network agility and network reliability. It does this by consolidating multiple applications onto fewer enterprise-level servers.

Hundreds of servers can be reduced to tens of servers with consolidation and virtualization. Server utilizations of 10% or less can be increased of 60% or more. IT infrastructure agility, reliability and efficiency are improved.

• Enterprise-Level Servers (2-way servers at minimum)
• Multiport Intel® PRO/1000 Server Adapters (three ports minimum for virtualization)
• VMware* virtualization software suite

Like any other server, virtualized servers require high-performance network connections. However, with virtualization, server port counts become more critical. For example, VMware recommends a minimum of three Gigabit Ethernet ports for handling traffic between the server, the network, and VMware services.

For additional reliability, redundant fail-over connections are also recommended. Without redundancy, a connection failure could take the server and all of its VMs off the network. To prevent such a disaster, be sure to use extra ports to provide redundant failover. Still more ports may be required for network segmentation in multi-tier datacenter architectures.

Intel® PRO/1000 Dual and Quad Port Server Adapters provide high port densities while conserving server slots for other applications such as RAID. Additionally, Intel® Advanced Network Services (ANS) software, included with Intel® PRO/1000 Server Adapters, provides adapter management and teaming services for increased performance and reliability.

• Learn more about Intel® PRO server adapters

Virtualization allows different applications-even different operating systems (OSs)-to run simultaneously on the same enterprise-level server by partitioning the server resources into multiple virtual machines (VMs). Each VM acts just like an individual, stand-alone server, but actually runs under the umbrella of one virtualized server.

Running multiple applications on a single server increases server efficiency and reduces the number of servers to be managed and maintained. When workloads increase, additional VMs can be quickly created for agile response to changing needs without adding physical servers. And, with VMware* technology, IT administrators can move live, running VMs from server to server while maintaining continuous server availability.

• Learn more about VMware* virtualization solutions

Intel® PRO Gigabit Server Adapters offer the highest degree of flexibility in adding server ports. Single-port and dual-port Gigabit Ethernet cards are available for both copper and fiber applications, and a quad-port Gigabit Ethernet card is available for copper networks. For high port density, the dual- and quad-port adapters occupy a single PCI-X slot, saving the remaining server slots for other applications (RAID, etc.). Also, Intel® PRO Gigabit Server Adapters feature flexible 10/100/1000Mbps auto-negotiation and are compatible with most existing on-board Ethernet LAN controllers on your new servers or on your currently installed server base.

Intel® PRO Gigabit Server Adapters enhance server efficiency with Large Send Off (LSO) and TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) that unburden the server by moving CPU-intensive network tasks off the server and onto the adapter card.

Intel® Advanced Network Services (ANS) software maximizes network productivity. With Intel ANS software, you can team multiple Intel® PRO Server Adapters with other adapters or LOM ports to scale network traffic flow for increased bandwidth and network reliability. Intel ANS is a free software download. When used with an Intel PRO Server Connection, it provides compatibility with all brands of network adapters for Link Aggregation, Adaptive Load Balancing or setting up Adapter Fault Tolerant teams. As a result, you can upgrade your existing Fast Ethernet connections by adding an Intel® PRO Gigabit Server Adapter and still use any existing Fast Ethernet connections for additional throughput or back-up fault tolerance.

Click here to download an overview of the complete line of Intel® PRO Adapters. (PDF 775K)