Users Guide

10 Solutions Overview Guide
Table 1. Emulated Devices and Synthetic Devices Overview
Hyper-V Virtual Machine Components
A VM consists of the following files:
• An XML file that contains the VM configuration information
• A BIN file for storing the VM memory state during suspend/save
operations
Emulated Devices • Emulated devices in Hyper-V VMs include:
– Legacy network adapter
– IDE controller
–COM ports
• All supported guest operating systems have device drivers for
emulated devices
• Software emulation of a PCI device
• Emulated devices are required for certain configurations:
– IDE controller is required as boot controller for VMs
– Legacy network adapter is required for VM PXE boot
• Performance of Emulated devices is lower than Synthetic
devices. Performance of certain devices may be improved by
installing the Integration Services. For example, the IDE
controller will switch to a synthetic mode after the
Integration Services are installed
Synthetic Devices • Synthetic devices in Hyper-V VMs include:
– SCSI controller
– Network adapter
• Guest operating systems do not have native support for
synthetic device drivers. Drivers are installed as part of the
Integration Services.
• Leverages the high-performance VSP-VSC shared memory
model to provide better performance for guest operating
systems