The Great Virtualisation Secret

Paravirtualisation is not theory, it’s been around and used now for well over a year but not many people know about it or even understand it.

Before we go further let’s first explain what paravirtualisation really is so that you don’t get confused by some of the technobabble that is currently on the internet.

The Paravirtualisation Myth

Here’s the myth. 

Paravirtualisation is virtualisation technology built into the operating system. Therefore any guest operating system running on the host OS will benefit from the massive performance gains.

In fact the above statement is very misleading. There are certainly performance gains from having virtualisation technology built into the operating system but not on the scale of paravirtualisation.

Diagram 1 is a simplified version of the difference between a system using 3rd party virtualisation software and one that doesn’t.