paravirtualization for Windows?

[jose_maria_gonz]

Hi team, a quick question;

Does ESX 3.5 supports paravirtualization for Windows? I am aware that it supports paravirtualizacion for Linux but not sure about the Windows world.

Thanking you in advance,

Rgds,

J.

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Moved to VI: Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Paravirutalization for Linux uses the VMI interface that is provided to the Linux kernel that drivers can use. However, I have not heard of a similar interface in the Windows Kernel. This is independent of ESX actually and something inside the guests.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[TomHowarth]

there is no such thing as paravirtualisation for Windows, to paravirtualise a Guest , you need to modifiy the kernal, (in Windows case the HAL) this is easy(ish) in Linux as the kernal is open source, however windows is close source and the source code to modify is not available, you could reverse engineer, a: if you had the funds (there is a very narrow definiation of what Reverse engineering is, but the most important part is the seperation between the people who investigate the product to produce the functional spec that the developers that are going to write the code)

so basically unless Microsoft produce a Version of Windows that is paravirtualised, it is unlikely to happen

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[jose_maria_gonz]

Hi Tom, all,

Thanks a lot , much appreciated. I guest that explain why Hyper-V support Windows guest paravirtualizatio?

Great stuff,

rgds,

J.

[larstr]

Actually, newer versions of windows (2008+Vista, w2k3 to some degree) supports paravirtualization through "enlightened drivers" (installed by Integration Services) similar to VMware's paravirtualized vmxnet that is installed by VMware Tools. Hyper-V supports VMBus adapters, a range of paravirtualized hw devices (currently network and scsi adapters). Hyper-V is also able to run Linux guests paravirtualized if they are using xen kernels.

Lars