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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Paravirtualization

An approach in which the guest OS uses hypervisor-aware drivers or interfaces instead of emulated hardware, improving performance.

Definition

Paravirtual drivers include VMware VMXNET3 and PVSCSI, Hyper-V synthetic devices and KVM virtio. They reduce emulation overhead for network and storage I/O.

Example

Using virtio-net and virtio-blk in a KVM guest outperforms emulated e1000 and IDE devices.

Exam tip

Prefer paravirtual adapters (VMXNET3, PVSCSI, virtio) for performance.

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