Red Hat Virtualization provides system administrators with the means to run fully-virtualized, unmodified, operating system guests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This provides companies with the ability to consolidate older systems onto newer, more efficient hardware. This reduces physical space and operating costs involved with powering and cooling older, less efficient systems. Full virtualization incurs I/O performance penalties compared to native (also known as bare-metal) installation of an operating system.

Para-virtualization is a virtualization technique which involves running modified versions of operating systems. Para-virtualization has input/output(I/O) performance very close to running bare-metal, non-virtualized operating systems. Para-virtualization only works with certain operating systems.

These two techniques, para-virtualization and full virtualization, can be combined to allow unmodified operating systems to receive near-native I/O performance by using para-virtualized drivers on fully-virtualized operating systems. This guide covers installation and configuration of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux para-virtualized drivers package for fully-virtualized Microsoft Windows guests.

The para-virtualized drivers package contains storage and network device drivers for fully-virtualized Microsoft Windows guests. The drivers provide Microsoft Windows guests running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with enhanced disk and network I/O performance.

This guide requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or later for the virtualization host system. Several versions of Microsoft Windows are supported as fully-virtualized guests. For a complete list of supported guests and other restrictions, refer to Chapter 2, Requirements and restrictions.