Product Overview

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack (SLE VMDP) contains disk, network, and balloon device drivers for Microsoft Windows Operating Systems that enable the high performance hosting of the unmodified guests on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) SP4 or later and Xen 3.2, though the recommended host is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 (SLES 11) or later and Xen 4.2 or KVM 1.4. In order to use these paravirtualized drivers, the underlying hardware must be Intel* Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) enabled. The guest Operating Systems supported by this driver pack are:

• Microsoft Windows* Server 2012 or later (WHQL certified)
• Microsoft Windows* Server 2008 SP2 or later(WHQL certified)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or later (WHQL certified)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later (WHQL certified)
• Microsoft Windows 8 or later
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or later
• Microsoft Windows Vista* SP2 or later
• Microsoft Windows XP SP3 or later

Note: Customers can now download the latest versions of these drivers directly from the Novell download site. Relevant subscription is necessary for support and maintenance requests of SLE VMDP.

Virtualization allows the consolidation of Windows and Linux workloads on newer, more powerful, energy-efficient hardware while promoting effective utilization of unused capacity, quick recovery from datacenter disaster and significant reduction of costs. While the paravirtualized flavor of a guest OS is aware of the underlying virtualization platform, and can therefore interact efficiently with the network and block devices, the situation is less promising for a full-virtualized guest OS (a.k.a HVM guest). Thus, unmodified operating systems such as 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, resulting in considerable performance loss.

The device drivers in SLE VMDP 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 appears as a normal, physical disk to the operating system. However, the disk 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.

SLE VMDP also includes memory ballooning capabilities. Memory ballooning allows the memory available to a virtual machine to shrink and expand within the range specified by the virtual machine's configuration parameters.

For Systems Requirements, click on this link.