VMware

The transparent virtualization interface supports hypervisor diversity, allowing the same kernel to run on VMware's hypervisor, on other hypervisors, or on a native machine. This release provides support for paravirtualized guest operating systems running on VMware's hosted platform or a native machine using VMI as the paravirtualization interface. VMware continues its collaboration with the Linux community to develop a common paravirtualization interface specification that supports multiple hypervisors. With this common specification, Linux OS distributors and ISVs can support a single kernel image solution that is paravirtualized without compromising performance.

Because this Preview is based on a hosted virtual machine architecture, it is not intended to demonstrate I/O performance improvement for paravirtualization. It will, however, demonstrate improved performance on CPU intensive workloads. Subsequent implementations on a bare-metal hypervisor architecture, such as the VMware ESX, will demonstrate improved CPU and I/O performance due to paravirtualization.

Downloads in this release:

Technology Preview of a platform supporting paravirtualization
Build 31454 | 9/14/06

 (.rpm)
md5sum: c52bbe09ab1a81560f0ef1e93d83bbb1

 (.tar)
md5sum: f34305ed3d7034f965c7b039f8a612fa

Source of VMware's VMI Implementation
The source is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, VERSION 2.0, as published by THE FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION. VMware intends to dual-license this source and initiate a program for administering potential contributions. Please email about specific questions regarding this source.

md5sum: 535701f07c1cb08bcfc28fd0d555e8d4

VMI Specification

Paravirtualized Appliances

Fedora Core 5 Appliance (view screen shot)
HTTP Download (md5sum: ab2f55df7f198aefffe5003969d82001)
BitTorrent Download (what is BitTorrent?)

Suse OSS 10.1 Appliance (view screen shot)
HTTP Download (md5sum: e7ee1f7499b4c52e5d042ca78e4b4112)
BitTorrent Download (what is BitTorrent?)

Getting Started Guide for the Paravirtual Appliances

Notes for this release:

  • This Technology Preview Release supports running on x86 and x86_64 linux hosts only. You need to download this on a linux host with kernel sources and gcc installed since pre-built modules are not provided with this release. Our testing of this release has been done on FC5 and Suse OSS 10.1 hosts. We encourage testing on other linux distributions and appreciate any feedback that you can provide.
  • The Paravirtualized appliances are 32-bit only and have been configured to refuse to boot on native (so they will not run as a guest OS on other VMware products not containing a VMI-capable hypervisor). If you wish to run these kernels on native hardware, recompile to get a kernel capable of running natively or in a hypervisor by turning off CONFIG_VMI_REQUIRE_HYPERVISOR in the kernel .config file.
  • The paravirtualized appliances are not able to power themselves off, because ACPI is not yet supported by VMI. VMI guests must be explicitly powered off via Troubleshoot->Power off and quit.
  • USB support is unstable and is not supported in this release. The accompanying appliances therefore have USB turned off by default.

Please email your feedback about this technology preview release.

Note: This is a Technology Preview and not supported product release. The intent of this message is for VMware staff to communicate information about the technology preview release to a select group of people and solicit their feedback. As such all caveats about technology preview releases apply to this version including no guarantees of introducing or supporting features in this technology preview release in any current or future VMware products.