With QLogic's VMflex technology, one Intelligent Ethernet Adapter is viewed by the server OS as multiple standalone NICs (up to four per physical Ethernet port), with the ability to allocate guaranteed bandwidth to each virtual adapter. NIC Partitioning eliminates purchasing and installing multiple, physical 1 GbE NIC adapters that are dedicated to specific server applications or tasks (networking, backup, management, etc.). These virtual adapters can also be assigned to individual virtual machines (VMs) to provide QoS, security, and higher system performance in virtualized servers. This unique feature can be switch dependent or switch agnostic - it is not necessary to pair a 3200 Series adapter with any specific 10 GbE switch model to enable partitioning. The 3200 Series adapters also feature industry-standard SR-IOV support, which provides broad interoperability, ease of device configuration/ management, and improved system performance in a virtualized environment.