Paravirtualization...what's that?
In the course of a working week with customers and partners the term 'Paravirtualization' comes up frequently. I've linked to what wikipedia has to say about it and also show a snippet from Ben Armstrong where he answered a question on Paravirtualization and Viridian (Viridian a.k.a Windows Server virtualization):
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Enlightenments (or Paravirutalization) comes in two flavors.
The first is modifications to the guest operating systems kernel that allow it to be aware of the fact that is running on top of a hypervisor, and change the way it acts in order to achieve the best performance in this environment.
The second is optimized drivers for devices such as network cards, storage objects, etc.
Microsoft will be providing optimized drivers for Windows Server 2008, and for earlier versions of Windows Server. Microsoft is also working to implement kernel enlightenments in Windows Server 2008.
We also working with XenSource to develop kernel enlightenments and optimized drivers for Linux when running on top of Windows virtualization.
Three important/interesting things to note here are:
- Operating systems without any enlightenments will run under windows virtualization.
- None of these features have been changed or cut, in fact the beta three release of windows server 2008 has many enlightenments already present.
- Unlike with Linux, windows server 2008 has a single unified kernel that is used both on physical hardware and in virtual environments. As such there is no kernel patching or kernel swapping involved.
Technorati tags: virtualization, wsv, viridian