Server virtualization in the data-center adds to the networking path thereby reducing the overall bandwidth available to the applications. One important trend is therefore to utilize the Single Root- IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) to share the NIC among multiple virtual machines while being able to provide full bandwidth.
This paper will discuss mechanisms and innovations that may be employed for simplified configuration and management of SR-IOV NICs. We further discuss a simple mechanism to enable migration of VM's when using SR-IOV NICs without any VM specific configuration. Even as SR-IOV is used for network performance the workloads must still be fully protected and the same firewall or security ACLs imposed on the traffic. We will discuss automating network security profiles configuration and migration with the VM when using SR-IOV NICs, Finally we consider mechanisms to provide failover redundancy to VMs when using SR-IOV virtual functions.