Chapter 12. Xen Para-virtualized Drivers

Para-virtualized drivers provide increased performance for fully virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests. Use these drivers if you are using fully virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests and require better performance.

The RPM packages for the para-virtualized drivers include the modules for storage and networking para-virtualized drivers for the supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest operating systems. These drivers enable high performance throughput of I/O operations in unmodified Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest operating systems on top of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (or greater) host.

The supported guest operating systems are:

The drivers are not supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest operating systems prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 .

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as the virtualization platform allows system administrators to consolidate Linux and Windows workloads onto newer, more powerful hardware with increased power and cooling efficiency. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (as of update 6) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 guest operating systems are aware of the underlying virtualization technology and can interact with it efficiently using specific interfaces and capabilities. This approach can achieve similar throughput and performance characteristics compared to running on the bare metal system.

As para-virtualization requires a modified guest operating system, not all operating systems can use para-virtualization. For operating systems which can not be modified, full virtualization is required. Full virtualization, by default, uses emulated disk, network, video and other hardware devices. Emulated I/O devices can be very slow and are not suited for applications requiring high disk and/or network throughput. The majority of the performance loss with virtualization occurs through the use of emulated devices.

The para-virtualized device drivers are included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages. The drivers bring many of the performance advantages of para-virtualized guest operating systems to unmodified operating systems because only the para-virtualized device driver (but not the rest of the operating system) is aware of the underlying virtualization platform.

After installing the para-virtualized device drivers, a disk device or network card will continue to appear as a normal, physical disk or network card to the operating system. However, now the device driver interacts directly with the virtualization platform (with no emulation) to efficiently deliver disk and network access, allowing the disk and network subsystems to operate at near native speeds even in a virtualized environment, without requiring changes to existing guest operating systems.

The para-virtualized drivers have certain host requirements. 64 bit hosts can run: