Intel said Monday system manufacturers are ready to turn on the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities in its "Paxville" Xeon processors.

Intel has released a BIOS upgrade for systems builders that use Xeon MP 7000 processors for servers that have four or more sockets, said Lori Wigle, director of marketing for the Server Platform Group at Intel, Santa Clara, Calif. When Intel originally shipped those processors in the forth quarter, the hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities were built in but not supported in the system BIOS.

Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM also are shipping new BIOS versions that solution providers can use to upgrade branded systems, she said.

On the software side, Wigle said VMWare's new free entry-level sever will support Intel's virtualization technology, as will the company's existing GSX product. Other products that will support Intel's technology are Microsoft's forthcoming Virtual Server 2005 and Novell's Xen 3.0, she said.

Also on Monday, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif., released its I/O virtualization technology specification.