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Platform virtualization software, specifically emulators and hypervisors, are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often providing multiple virtual machines on one physical platform. The table below compares basic information about platform virtualization hypervisors.

General

Features

• Providing any virtual environment usually requires some overhead of some type or another. Native usually means that the virtualization technique does not do any CPU level virtualization (like Bochs), which executes code more slowly than when it is directly executed by a CPU. Some other products such as VMware and Virtual PC use similar approaches to Bochs and QEMU, however they use a number of advanced techniques to shortcut most of the calls directly to the CPU (similar to the process that JIT compiler uses) to bring the speed to near native in most cases. However, some products such as coLinux, Xen, z/VM (in real mode) do not suffer the cost of CPU-level slowdowns as the CPU-level instructions are not proxied or executing against an emulated architecture since the guest OS or hardware is providing the environment for the applications to run under. However access to many of the other resources on the system, such as devices and memory may be proxied or emulated in order to broker those shared services out to all the guests, which may cause some slow downs as compared to running outside of virtualization.
• OS-level virtualization is described as "native" speed, however some groups have found overhead as high as 3% for some operations, but generally figures come under 1%, so long as secondary effects do not appear.
• See for a paper comparing performance of paravirtualization approaches (e.g. Xen) with OS-level virtualization
• Requires patches/recompiling.
• Exceptional for lightweight, paravirtualized, single-user VM/CMS interactive shell: largest customers run several thousand users on even single prior models. For multiprogramming OSes like Linux on IBM Z and z/OS that make heavy use of native supervisor state instructions, performance will vary depending on nature of workload but is near native. Hundreds into the low thousands of Linux guests are possible on a single machine for certain workloads.

Image type compatibility

Other features

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 have limited support for redirecting the USB protocol over RDP using RemoteFX.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 adds accelerated graphics support for certain editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 using RemoteFX.

Restrictions

This table is meant to outline restrictions in the software dictated by licensing or capabilities.

Note: No limit means no enforced limit. For example, a VM with 1 TB of memory cannot fit in a host with only 8 GB memory and no memory swap disk, so it will have a limit of 8 GB physically.

See also

• List of computer system emulators
• Comparison of application virtualization software
• Comparison of OS emulation or virtualization apps on Android
• Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements
• Virtual DOS machine
• x86 virtualization

Notes

1. Can run a guest OS without modifying it, and hence is generally able to run any OS that could run on a physical machine the VM simulates.
2. Older versions of VMware Workstation support x86.
3. Older versions of VMware Player/VMware Workstation Player support x86.

References

1. "Bhyve supports Windows". Retrieved 22 December 2015.
2. "1.8. Supported Platforms". Bochs.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
3. "3.4. Compiling Bochs". Bochs.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
4. "Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19559". blogs.windows.com. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
5. "PowerPC – KVM". Linux-kvm.org. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
6. "Development Preview of KVM Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM". redhat.com. Retrieved 15 May 2017.
7. ^ "QEMU Official OS Support List Version 2.0". Claunia.com. Archived from the original on 15 August 2011. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
8. Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual, Chapter 3: Configuring virtual machines | Mac OS X guests
9. "virtualbox.org • View topic – Theo de Raadt discourages VirtualBox usage." forums.virtualbox.org. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
10. "Oracle and Virtual Iron". Oracle.com. 13 May 2009. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
11. "VMware Player Pro FAQs: Create and run virtual machines | United States". Vmware.com. 17 October 2014. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
12. Archived 15 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
13. "Licenses – xcp-ng/xcp Wiki". GitHub. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
14. "Main Page – KVM". Linux-kvm.org. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
15. Look at RedHat or Novell for details
16. Logical Domains#Supported guest operating systems
17. "Welcome to". Imperas. 12 March 2014. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
18. Archived 2008-08-10 at the Wayback Machine
19. ^ "A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors for Cloud Computing". Digitalcommons.unf.edu. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
20. Soltesz, S.; et al. (2007). "Container-based Operating System Virtualization" (PDF). EuroSys. ACM SIGOPS. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 July 2014. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
21. "8.19. Disk Image Modes". Bochs.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
22. ^ "Chapter 9. Advanced topics". Virtualbox.org. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
23. ^ "Xen blktap2 driver". Retrieved 3 February 2014.
24. ^ "Virtual Machine Manager". Archived from the original on 10 June 2007. Retrieved 20 February 2010.
25. "Sheepdog is a distributed storage system for KVM". Archived from the original on 22 February 2013. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
26. "KVM Migration". Retrieved 20 May 2010.
27. "beadm in Non-Global Zones – Creating and Administering Oracle Solaris 11.2 Boot Environments". oracle.com. 11 November 2014.
28. ^ "What are "VirtualBox Guest Additions"?". Retrieved 12 April 2019.
29. ^ "VirtualBox Changelog 3.1". Archived from the original on 28 September 2010. Retrieved 1 October 2010.
30. ^ "Introduction to Guest Additions". Retrieved 12 April 2019.
31. "VirtualBox Changelog 3.0". Archived from the original on 3 December 2009. Retrieved 30 June 2009.
32. "Changelog for VirtualBox 6.1". Retrieved 16 February 2020. Linux host: Drop PCI passthrough,
33. "VirtualBox manual: PCI passthrough". Retrieved 12 May 2012.
34. "VMware VMDirectPath I/O". Retrieved 12 May 2012.
35. ^ "VMGL (formerly Xen-GL)". Archived from the original on 4 November 2007.
36. "VMware Workstation Features, Multiple OS, Run Linux on Windows – United States". Vmware.com. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
37. "Xen USB Passthrough". Retrieved 12 April 2018.
38. "Configuring USB Device Redirection with Microsoft RemoteFX Step-by-Step Guide". Technet.microsoft.com. 16 February 2011. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
39. "Microsoft RemoteFX". Technet.microsoft.com. 23 February 2011. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
40. "Hardware Considerations for RemoteFX". Technet.microsoft.com. 8 February 2011. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
41. "Using VMware Workstation Player for Windows" (PDF). 2 March 2020.
42. "Configuration Maximums : Sphere 4.1" (PDF). Vmware.com. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
43. "Configuration Maximums : Sphere 5.0" (PDF). Vmware.com. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
44. "Free Virtualization with VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi)" (in Dutch). Vmware.com. Retrieved 17 January 2014.
45. "Configuration Maximums VMware vSphere 5.5" (PDF). VMWare Inc. 30 October 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
46. "VMware Configuration Maximum tool". VMWare Inc. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
47. "VMware Configuration Maximum tool". VMWare Inc. Retrieved 27 January 2022.
48. "Chapter 1. First steps". Virtualbox.org. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
49. "Requirements and Limits for Virtual Machines and Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2". Retrieved 10 February 2015.
50. Protalinski, Emil (1 September 2009). "Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 arrives for free". Ars Technica. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
51. "Hyper-V Scalability in Windows Server 2012". Technet.microsoft.com. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
52. "Hyper-V Limits the Maximum Number of Processors in the Hyper-V Host OS to 64". Retrieved 16 February 2020.
53. "Plan for Hyper-V scalability in Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019". 28 September 2016. Retrieved 16 February 2020.

• Software comparisons
• Virtualization software
• Platform virtualization software