Paravirtualization

Paravirtualization is an extension of virtualization technology that ensures recompilation of a guest operating system before it is installed inside a Virtual Machine(VN). It facilitates running of different operating systems on a single set of hardware by reducing time taken to complete the operation.

Explicit porting of the guest operating system is significant prior to installation of a virtual machine since a non- customized guest OS would be unable to run on top of a virtual machine monitor.

Paravirtualization provisions an interface to VMs that are somewhat similar to underlying hardware. Paravirtualization ensures optimization of system performance and mitigates overhead to prevent underutilization of VMs as in case of full virtualization.

There are many applications of Paravirtualization that make use of its scaling efficiencies and vital performance enhancing characteristics. It is used in disaster recovery, capacity management, data migration, and so forth.

Paravirtualization obviates the need for trapping, a time consuming process used in full virtualization. One of the commonest uses of Paravirtualization is for partitioning development environments from test systems.