Paravirtualization

What Does Paravirtualization Mean?

Paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that provides an interface to virtual machines that are similar to their underlying hardware. In paravirtualization, the guest operating system is explicitly ported before installing a virtual machine because a non-tailored guest operating system cannot run on top of a virtual machine monitor (VMM).

Techopedia Explains Paravirtualization

Paravirtualization enables several different operating systems to run on one set of hardware by effectively using resources such as processors and memory. In paravirtualization, the operating system is modified to work with a virtual machine. The intention behind the modification of the operating system is to minimize the execution time required in performing the operations that are otherwise difficult to run in a virtual environment.

Paravirtualization has many significant performance advantages and its efficiencies offer better scaling. As a result, it is used in various areas of technology such as:

• Partitioning development environments from test systems
• Disaster recovery
• Migrating data from one system to another
• Capacity management

Paravirtualization technology was introduced by IBM and was developed as an open-source software project.