By Chad Jones | Vice President, Product Management
An article came across my email the other day titled “VMware, Citrix struggle with bare metal hypervisor”. (Article can be seen here: http://ow.ly/1rbAp). The biggest issue that was hampering the efforts was the device driver model, and I can understand why this is a big issue.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in the market is that a client hypervisor is simply a server hypervisor that is running on a client PC with some bells and whistles for distributed management. This misperception comes from many places but mainly because you can, in fact, run Hyper-V, XEN Server or ESXi right on your laptop with a single Windows client instance and have it essentially work. However, when we look at the practical requirements of Enterprise computing, there are a wide range of use cases that require specifically tailored configurations for local client computing, which a client hypervisor is specifically designed to handle and a server hypervisor is not. This is most clearly personified in the device driver model.
Server hypervisors interact with a finite and known set of devices. Typically, servers have no requirement for a rich UI experience or multimedia capabilities, let alone a monitor in its lid like a laptop. It also does not have batteries and the power management concerns that accompany portable computing, nor does a server typically sleep. Most importantly, the server doesn’t have a random set of USB devices that connect to it and are expected to simply work without special IT intervention. Device diversity and performance are very big concerns when it comes to maintaining the rich user experience of client computing. In most client hypervisors (as in server hypervisors), there are typically two device driver models: emulation and paravirtualization. However, Neocleus has productized a third model, known as pass-through, which utilizes the native Windows device driver in conjunction with the client hypervisor. This model is critical for reaching the broadest set of client computing use cases in the Enterprise.
I put together a comparison white paper on the three device driver models and how they can work independently or together so IT can reach their desktop goals. It’s entitled “Client Hypervisor Device Driver Overview” and can be found here.
