Paravirtualization (PV) is a technique used in virtualization that presents a software interface to virtual machines that represents the underlying hardware. Essentially, it means that virtual machines will see and use the underlying hardware just as they normally would if they were running as a single operating system on a physical server. The virtual machine has been modified or enhanced to work with the hypervisor through an API, for example. This is where XenTools and VMware Tools come into play, and we will talk about that more later.
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In paravirtualization, the virtual machine and the hypervisor know about each other and work together. Paravirtualization is optimized and fast.
PV abstracts the underlying hardware into software-based hardware constructs. Paravirtualization was first introduced by the Xen hypervisor team. The first time I came across the concept of paravirtualization was when I was working on marrying the first open source router (Vyatta) with the...