Announced today, Virtual Iron 4.0 is one of the first to take advantage of the new Intel VT FlexPriority feature in their Xeon 7300 chips.

For more information, here's the press release. The highpoint is this:

Intel ran its test with Virtual Iron’s latest release, Version 4.0 – which is among the very first server virtualization software solutions to support the new Intel capability. When leveraging Intel VT FlexPriority on Virtual Iron, virtual servers benefited from up to 40% faster boot time and up to 35% performance improvement on 32-bit Windows guests (Windows Server 2000 & 2003 SP1 versions).

And this quote from Steve Noyes:

"Virtual Iron 4.0 showed up to 167% performance improvement on the new Intel Xeon 7300 processor based servers, relative to previous offerings as measured by Intel’s vConsolidate benchmark,” said Steve Noyes, vice president of engineering at Virtual Iron Software. “By turning on Intel VT FlexPriority, we have seen up to 35% incremental performance improvement and up to 40% faster boot time with certain Windows 32-bit guests. This new Intel VT extension allows our solution to avoid the common performance penalty these operating systems introduce when virtualized. This enables truly efficient SMP configurations of 32-bit guests to meet the demands of critical enterprise applications in a virtualized environment"