Quoting from the Neterion official announcement:
Neterion, Inc., the industry leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) adapters and a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, announced that its Xframe V-NIC 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters will have native support in the upcoming release of VMware’s ESX 3.5 virtualized operating system.
Engineering teams from Neterion and VMware have worked closely to mutually optimize support of 10 GbE in ESX, now offering near-line rate 10 Gbps performance at parity with native Linux or Windows operating systems. This was demonstrated at VMworld in San Francisco when Neterion, IBM and VMware jointly ran virtualized machines at 10 GbE speeds comparable to servers running single, non-virtualized applications. Many network intensive tasks, such as VMware’s VMotion, require a large network pipe to allow the nearly instantaneous migration of virtualized applications. As the datasets of these applications grow larger, Gigabit Ethernet will not be sufficient. Neterion’s 10 GbE adapters remove this network bottleneck, enabling a new class of I/O-intensive applications to be virtualized…