Many customers who are considering blade servers also plan to adopt virtualization technology such as virtual machines. Since blade servers function the same way as standard servers, they do not have a direct impact on the deployment of virtual machine software. However, blade servers often separate processing from I/O functions such as storage and networking, which requires some level of I/O virtualization in the blade server platform. Also, some blade servers may offer more robust server partitioning functions based on hypervisors or other operating systems (such as UNIX), which users may prefer for the most critical workloads.

Click on one of the links below to see how the virtualization functions of the studied systems compare:

	I/O Virtualization (2 ratings)
	Blade Partitioning Options (2 ratings)