S2600GZ and S2600GL

Technology Support Intel® Server Board S2600GZ/GL TPS
5. Technology Support
5.1
Intel
®
Virtualization Technology – Intel
®
VT-x/VT-d/VT-c
Intel
®
Virtualization Technology consists of three components which are integrated and interrelated, but which
address different areas of Virtualization.
 Intel
®
Virtualization Technology (VT-x) is processor-related and provides capabilities needed to
provide hardware assist to a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM).
 Intel
®
Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) is primarily concerned with virtualizing I/O
efficiently in a VMM environment. This would generally be a chipset I/O feature, but in the Second
Generation Intel
®
Core™ Processor Family there is an Integrated I/O unit embedded in the
processor, and the IIO is also enabled for VT-d.
 Intel
®
Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (VT-c) is primarily concerned I/O hardware assist
features, complementary to but independent of VT-d.
Intel
®
VT-x is designed to support multiple software environments sharing same hardware resources. Each
software environment may consist of OS and applications. The Intel
®
Virtualization Technology features can be
enabled or disabled in the BIOS setup. The default behavior is disabled.
Intel
®
VT-d is supported jointly by the Intel
®
Xeon
®
Processor E5 4600/2600/2400/1600 Product Families and
the C600 chipset. Both support DMA remapping from inbound PCI Express* memory Guest Physical Address
(GPA) to Host Physical Address (HPA). PCI devices are directly assigned to a virtual machine leading to a
robust and efficient virtualization.
The Intel
®
S4600/S2600/S2400/S1600/S1400 Server Board Family BIOS publishes the DMAR table in the
ACPI Tables. For each DMA Remapping Engine in the platform, one exact entry of DRHD (DMA Remapping
Hardware Unit Definition) structure is added to the DMAR. The DRHD structure in turn contains a Device
Scope structure that describes the PCI endpoints and/or sub-hierarchies handled by the particular DMA
Remapping Engine.
Similarly, there are reserved memory regions typically allocated by the BIOS at boot time. The BIOS marks
these regions as either reserved or unavailable in the system address memory map reported to the OS. Some
of these regions can be a target of DMA requests from one or more devices in the system, while the OS or
executive is active. The BIOS reports each such memory region using exactly one RMRR (Reserved Memory
Region Reporting) structure in the DMAR. Each RMRR has a Device Scope listing the devices in the system
that can cause a DMA request to the region.
For more information on the DMAR table and the DRHD entry format, refer to the Intel
®
Virtualization
Technology for Directed I/O Architecture Specification. For more general information about VT-x, VT-d, and
VT-c, a good reference is Enabling Intel
®
Virtualization Technology Features and Benefits White Paper.
5.2
Intel
®
Intelligent Power Node Manager
Data centers are faced with power and cooling challenges that are driven by increasing numbers of servers
deployed and server density in the face of several data center power and cooling constraints. In this type of
environment, Information Technology (IT) needs the ability to monitor actual platform power consumption and
control power allocation to servers and racks in order to solve specific data center problems including the
following issues.
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