Full and para
Full and para
The hypervisor virtualizes the physical hardware and presents each virtual
machine with a standardized set of virtual devices.
The front-end driver manages the I/O requests of the guest OS and the
backend driver is responsible for managing the real I/O devices and
multiplexing the I/O data of different VMs. These generic (standard)
backend drivers installed in Linux or Windows OS can be overtaxed by the
activity of multiple virtual machines and
are not optimized for multiple VM workloads.
With the drivers in the hypervisor, VMware ESXi uses optimized and
hardened device drivers and provides special treatment, in the form of CPU
scheduling and memory resources, that they need to process I/O loads from
multiple virtual machines.
Scalability of VMWare and Xen
driver models
VMware direct driver model scales better than the indirect driver model in
Xen.
As shown in the chart below, Xen, which uses the indirect driver model,
shows a severe I/O bottleneck with just three concurrent virtual machines,
while VMware ESX continues to scale I/O throughput as virtual machines
are added.
Small ESXi Code Footprint