SLE10 VMI support

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

Situation

Applies to x86, 32bit only - VMware virtualization products
Do SUSE SLE10/11 products support VMI (Virtual Machine Interface)?

Resolution

The x86 (32-bit) version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10/11 supports VMI as of Service Pack 2, through the kernel-vmi package available on the media and through the online update system. VMware has no 64 bit VMI support as there havn't been significant performance improvements.

There will be no VMI support in future SLE versions, as e.g. hardware features of modern CPUs have allowed to bring the hypervisor overhead memory consumption down, so VMI will not save memory at the hypervisor level. Furthermore, fixes regarding timekeeping have been included in the main kernel. Therefore a seperate kernel architecture will not be needed anymore.

Additional Information

Background

VMI, the Virtual Machine Interface, is a technology developed by VMware which has been added to the kernel in order to provide a paravirtualization interface to the hypervisor.
For more information, refer to VMware's page about Transparent Paravirtualization.

Disclaimer

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