Virtualization Infrastructure - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 11-05-2007 Installation Manual

22.2 Virtualization Infrastructure

The basic components of virtualization are a virtualization host server and virtual ma-
chines.
• The virtualization host server provides a virtualization platform (Xen Hypervisor)
and a management environment (SUSE Linux desktop) to host virtual machines.
• Virtual machines are instances of virtual hardware that operating systems recognize
as a physical computer. A virtual machine can run an operating system in full vir-
tualization mode or paravirtual mode.
• Full virtualization mode lets virtual machines run unmodified operating systems,
such as Windows Server 2003, but requires the computer running the virtualization
host server to support hardware-assisted virtualization technology.
• Paravirtual mode does not require a computer that supports hardware-assisted
virtualization technology but requires the operating system emulates only key
aspects of the computer but requires that the operating system be modified for
the virtualization environment. Operating systems currently modified to run in
paravirtual mode include SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Open Enterprise
Server 2 NetWare.
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