While the use of virtualization was once confined to proprietary server and mainframe computing systems, established and emerging applications for virtualization in both server and client systems are moving it into the mainstream. Despite the promise of new and existing virtualization usages, many challenges stand in the way of achieving efficient virtualization of today’s IA-based systems.

VT-x and VT-i are the first components of Intel® VT, a series of processor innovations soon to become available in IA-based client and server platforms. VT-x and VT-i offer solutions to the problems inherent in IA-32 and Itanium® processor virtualization and thus enable the development of simpler VMM software that supports a wider range of legacy and future OSs while maintaining high levels of performance.