The RPM packages for the para-virtualized drivers include the modules for storage and networking para-virtualized drivers for the supported Red Hat Enterprise guest operating systems. These drivers will enable high performance throughput of IO 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 Linux and Windows workloads to be consolidated onto newer, more powerful hardware which has increased power and cooling efficiency. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 guest operating systems (as of update 6) 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 this approach requires modifications in the guest operating system not all operating systems and use models can use para-virtualized virtualization. For operating systems which can not be modified the underlying virtualization infrastructure has to emulate the server hardware (CPU, Memory as well as IO devices for storage and network). Emulation for IO devices can be very slow and will be especially troubling for high-throughput disk and network subsystems. The majority of the performance loss occurs in this area.

The para-virtualized device drivers part of the distributed RPM packages 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 can be deployed in 32-bit and 64-bit fully-virtualized/HVM guest operating systems. If the underlying host is running as a 64-bit platform the guest operating systems can be either 64-bit or 32-bit as well as mixing 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems is supported), in either case the para-virtualized drivers can be installed. On a 32-bit host only 32-bit guest operating systems can be deployed.