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Virtual Machine Drivers
Virtualization allows the consolidation of workloads on newer, more powerful, energy-
efficient hardware. Paravirtualized operating systems such as SUSE® Linux Enterprise
Desktop and other Linux distributions are aware of the underlying virtualization platform,
and can therefore interact efficiently with it. Unmodified operating systems such as
Microsoft Windows* are unaware of the virtualization platform and expect to interact
directly with the hardware. Because this is not possible when consolidating servers, the
hardware must be emulated for the operating system. Emulation can be slow, but it is
especially troubling for high-throughput disk and network subsystems. Most performance
loss occurs in this area.
The SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack contains 32-bit and 64-bit
paravirtualized network, bus and block drivers for a number of Microsoft Windows
operating systems (including Windows XP*, Windows Server* and Windows 7*).
These drivers bring many of the performance advantages of paravirtualized operating
systems to unmodified operating systems because only the paravirtualized device
driver (not the rest of the operating system) is aware of the virtualization platform. For
example, a paravirtualized disk device driver appears as a normal, physical disk to the
operating system. However, the device driver interacts directly with the virtualization
platform (with no emulation) to efficiently deliver disk access, allowing the disk and
network subsystems to operate at near native speeds in a virtualized environment,
without requiring changes to existing operating systems.
The SUSE® Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack is available as an add-on
product for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. For detailed information please refer to
http://www.novell.com/products/vmdriverpack/.
Virtual Machine Drivers
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