Hi,
First off this list is for Oracle VM Server for SPARC (a.k.a. OVM/SPARC, a.k.a.
Logical Domains, a.k.a. LDoms). It does not use the Xen hypervisor and is
completely different from Oracle VM Server for x86.
With OVM on SPARC, the device drivers are not emulated to fool guest domains.
Instead, guest domains have virtual drivers to communicate over the Logical
Domain Channels (LDCs) to the Primary or Service Domain where a virtual service
(VDS, VSW, etc.) will communicate with the correct underlining Solaris device
driver that has direct access to the physical hardware. So basically, I/O
operations are proxied to the Primary or Service Domain that has direct access
to the physical hardware. This takes very little overhead and the drivers are
included in Solaris 10 and above on SPARC for guests. Guest domains can also be
assigned a physical PCI-E slot and the guest domain can use the normal Solaris
drivers to operate any PCI-E device on that slot. Another important distinction
here is that OVM on SPARC does not use time-slicing, hardware emulation, or
host based memory management. Instead, the UltraSPARC hypervisor which is in
the firmware is able to partition
the CPU cores and threads for guests, partition memory at the memory
controller level, and partition PCI fabric devices. So when you create a
domain, you hardware partition CPU and memory resources. You can either
virtualize or partition I/O to guests depending on your requirements. This is
totally different from Xen, KVM, VMware, Hyper-V etc which all require a
infrastructure above the OS.
OVM on x86 is basically the Xen hypervisor running on Oracle Enterprise Linux.
With OVM on x86, there are two routes for guest domain drivers. Either you use
the paravirtualized drivers (PVM) to proxy I/O to the Dom0 or you use emulation
where QEMU is used to provide emulated hardware that the guest sees as being
real. As a result, the guest will use it's native device drivers and this
requires considerable overhead. The paravirtualized drivers will present a
virtual device that proxies requests back to Dom0 where a daemon will handle
the I/O requests to the native device drivers. This takes less overhead, but
requires special drivers to be installed in the guest OS if they are not
natively present (Windows, some Linux distros/versions, etc.). There is also
support for hardware acceleration (HVM) where the Intel/AMD extensions can help
with CPU and memory performance. Ultimately, VMware and OVM on x86 are very
similar under the hood and have differences
in constraints, limits, and management tools. But the driver mechanisms are
very similar as Linux is used as the underlining I/O infrastructure for both.
With most hypervisors on x86, QEMU is pretty much the defacto I/O emulation
tool used to emulate disk, network, and video hardware.
I hope this clears things up:)
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Octave J. Orgeron
Enterprise Architect, SCSA
Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com
E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
________________________________
From: "sunny.bis...@sungard.com" <sunny.bis...@sungard.com>
To: hud...@hra.nyc.gov; ldoms-discuss@opensolaris.org
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: [ldoms-discuss] Oracle VM vs VMWARE
Thanks for replying .
But still my question is not answered.
If we have OVM-X86 and the guests are windows/solari/linux ...will we be
requiring separate drivers ?
Thanks
Sunny Biswas * SunGard Computer Services * EON, Kharadi Knowledge Park
(SEZ), Pune 411014 INDIA . Tel +91 (20) 3012-7000 Extn: 7251 . Mobile +91
9765554258 * Service Desk 1800 628-9440
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-----Original Message-----
From: Hudes, Dana [mailto:hud...@hra.nyc.gov]
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:33 PM
To: Biswas, Sunny; ldoms-discuss@opensolaris.org
Subject: RE: Oracle VM vs VMWARE
OVM-SPARC (LDOM) presents a virtual interface if you virtualized the interface
(which you should). It is called net0. In Solaris 11, ALL Ethernet interfaces
are virtualized as netN
-----Original Message-----
From: ldoms-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org
[mailto:ldoms-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of
sunny.bis...@sungard.com
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:30 PM
To: ldoms-discuss@opensolaris.org
Subject: [ldoms-discuss] Oracle VM vs VMWARE
The xen hypervisor does not present the same driver for hardware devices such
as nic, scsi controller which means that we would have to manage device drivers
like we do with the different operating systems (win and lin/unix) whereas,
VMWARE presents a virtual driver to all the operating systems and it appears as
the same driver. Basically, vmware virtualizes the hardware presented to
virtual machines where virtual machines running on oracle vm will need native
drivers.
Is the above statement correct.....Do we need separate drivers for guest OS in
oracle VM ??
Thanks
Sunny
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