"Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. has added support for VMware
Inc.'s Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) to SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server (SLES) 10 SP2, which Novell says will make SUSE run faster
on VMware's ESX hypervisor.
"VMI is VMware's version of paravirtualization, in which the
operating system is 'aware' that it runs on a hypervisor and
offloads certain chip instructions to the hypervisor, reducing the
overhead of virtualization. Thus, a VMI-enabled operating system
should demonstrate better performance than a non-paravirtualized,
fully virtualized OS..."