openSUSE Leap Documentation › Virtualization Guide › Virtual Machine Drivers
ContentsContents
Virtualization Guide
  1. About This Manual
  2. I Introduction
    1. 1 Virtualization Technology
    2. 2 Introduction to Xen Virtualization
    3. 3 Introduction to KVM Virtualization
    4. 4 Introduction to Linux Containers
    5. 5 Virtualization Tools
    6. 6 Installation of Virtualization Components
    7. 7 Supported Guests, Hosts and Features
  3. II Managing Virtual Machines with libvirt
    1. 8 Starting and Stopping libvirtd
    2. 9 Guest Installation
    3. 10 Basic VM Guest Management
    4. 11 Connecting and Authorizing
    5. 12 Managing Storage
    6. 13 Managing Networks
    7. 14 Configuring Virtual Machines
  4. III Hypervisor-Independent Features
    1. 15 Disk Cache Modes
    2. 16 VM Guest Clock Settings
    3. 17 libguestfs
  5. IV Managing Virtual Machines with Xen
    1. 18 Setting Up a Virtual Machine Host
    2. 19 Virtual Networking
    3. 20 Managing a Virtualization Environment
    4. 21 Block Devices in Xen
    5. 22 Virtualization: Configuration Options and Settings
    6. 23 Administrative Tasks
    7. 24 XenStore: Configuration Database Shared between Domains
    8. 25 Xen as a High-Availability Virtualization Host
  6. V Managing Virtual Machines with QEMU
    1. 26 QEMU Overview
    2. 27 Setting Up a KVM VM Host Server
    3. 28 Guest Installation
    4. 29 Running Virtual Machines with qemu-system-ARCH
    5. 30 Virtual Machine Administration Using QEMU Monitor
  7. VI Managing Virtual Machines with LXC
    1. 31 Linux Containers
    2. 32 Migration from LXC to libvirt-lxc
  8. Glossary
  9. A Virtual Machine Drivers
  10. B Appendix
  11. C XM, XL Toolstacks and Libvirt framework
  12. D GNU Licenses
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openSUSE Leap Documentation › Virtualization Guide › Virtual Machine Drivers
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Applies to openSUSE Leap 42.1

A Virtual Machine Drivers

Virtualization allows the consolidation of workloads on newer, more powerful, energy-efficient hardware. Paravirtualized operating systems such as openSUSE® Leap 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 (VMDP) contains 32-bit and 64-bit paravirtualized network, bus and block drivers for several Microsoft Windows operating systems. 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 openSUSE Leap. For detailed information refer to http://www.suse.com/products/vmdriverpack/.

Refer to the Official VMDP Installation Guide at https://www.suse.com/documentation/sle-vmdp-22/ for more information.

→Appendix B Appendix←Glossary
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