Chapter 2. Requirements and restrictions

This chapter covers the hardware and software requirements for the para-virtualized Windows drivers.

The para-virtualized Windows drivers can be deployed on x86 (32-bit) and AMD64 or Intel 64 (64-bit) systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or later. The Itanium platform is presently unsupported for the para-virtualized drivers.

Hosts running AMD64 or Intel 64 (64-bit) Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run 64-bit or 32-bit fully virtualized Windows guests. Mixing 32-bit and 64-bit guest operating systems is supported.

Hosts running x86 (32-bit) Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only run 32-bit guest operating systems.

You require all of the items in this list for the para-virtualized Windows drivers:

one of the para-virtualized Windows drivers packages. The package installation process is described in Section 3.2, “Installing the para-virtualized drivers”.
- xenpv-win – The standard driver package.
- xenpv-win-debug – The debugging driver package.
a system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, or later, for the host.
one or more working Windows guests, as well as administrator level access to the guests.
at least 11MB of free space on each Windows guest.
root or sudo access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux host.

Supported operating systems

This section covers the supported Windows virtualized guest operating systems.

Support for para-virtualized drivers is available to virtualized guests running the following Microsoft Windows operating system versions.

Windows XP – Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
Windows XP – Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
Windows XP Professional x64 – Service Pack 2 – 64-bit
Windows XP Professional x64 – Service Pack 3 – 64-bit
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 – 64-bit
Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 – 64-bit
Windows Vista – Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
Windows Vista – Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
Windows Vista – Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
Windows Vista – Service Pack 2 – 64-bit
Windows Server 2008 – Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
Windows Server 2008 – Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
Windows Server 2008 – Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
Windows Server 2008 – Service Pack 2 – 64-bit

Note

All mentions of the term "64-bit" in this document refer to AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. Itanium systems are not supported at present by these drivers.

Other restrictions

Some additional technical restrictions apply to the para-virtualized drivers.

The system drive cannot run the para-virtualized block device drivers.
The system drive, identified by the %SYSTEMDRIVE% environment variable in Windows, is the device which contains boot information and system files for the Windows operating system. This device, usually labeled C: drive, contains the Windows directory and cannot use the para-virtualized drivers. The drivers can use a separate partition, logical volume or other physical block device to store applications and non-Windows data. This limitation is due to the limitations of the qemu package.
The para-virtualized drives cannot use copy-on-write (QCOW) disk images.
This is a technical limitation of the current version of the para-virtualized drivers. This limitation might be lifted by future releases of the drivers.

Sample configuration

This section presents an example configuration utilizing the para-virtualized drivers.

C: drive which contains Windows system files and uses the default, fully virtualized device drivers.
D: drive which contains applications and utilizes the para-virtualized drivers.