The Flexible Port Partitioning technique utilizes the industry standard PCI SIG SR-IOV to efficiently divide the physical Ethernet device into multiple virtual devices and offers Quality of Service by ensuring that each process is assigned to a virtual function and receives an appropriate share of the bandwidth. Virtual Machine Device Queues is a technique for offloading some switching operations from the Virtual Machine Monitor to network hardware specifically designed for this function. Virtual Machine Device Queues significantly reduces the operating costs associated with I/O switching within the Virtual Machine Monitor, which greatly increases throughput and overall system performance. Single Root I/O Virtualization includes the native (direct) sharing of a single I/O resource among multiple virtual machines. Single Root I/O Virtualization provides a mechanism through which a single root function (for example, a single Ethernet port) can be represented as multiple separate physical devices.