There are many options for IT administrators to consider when looking at a network interface setup. The start is simple enough–you have a physical server with two network interface cards (NICs). Now what? Depending on the size of the environment, engineers then have to worry about application load, switch capabilities, virtual local area networks (VLANs), workload traffic and general user traffic loads. In this tip, I'll discuss how I/O virtualization can be incorporated into network architecture to help reduce hardware costs.