Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
So, what kind of virtual hardware makes up a VM? By default, VMware ESXi presents the
following fairly generic hardware to the VM:
Phoenix BIOS
◆
◆
Intel motherboard
Intel PCI IDE controller
◆
IDE CD-ROM drive
◆
BusLogic parallel SCSI, LSI Logic parallel SCSI, or LSI Logic SAS controller
◆
◆
AMD or Intel CPU, depending upon the physical hardware
Intel E1000, Intel E1000e, or AMD PCnet NIC
◆
Standard VGA video adapter
◆
VMware selected this generic hardware to provide the broadest level of compatibility across
the entire supported guest OSes. As a result, it's possible to use commercial off-the-shelf driv-
ers when installing a guest OS into a VM. Figure 9.1 shows a couple of examples of VMware
vSphere providing virtual hardware that looks like standard physical hardware. Both the
network adapter and the storage adapter—identii ed as an Intel(R) 82574L Gigabit Network
Connection and an LSI SAS 3000 series adapter, respectively—have corresponding physical
counterparts, and drivers for these devices are available in many modern guest OSes.
Figure 9.1
VMware ESXi pro-
vides both generic
and virtualization-
optimized hardware
for VMs.
However, VMware vSphere may also present virtual hardware that is unique to the virtu-
alized environment. Look back at the display adapter in Figure 9.1. There is no such physical
