Users Guide

Solutions Overview Guide 7
partition or parent partition. This root partition hosts the Windows
Server 2008 instance that was running on the hardware prior to enabling the
Hyper-V role.
The root/parent partition is important for two main reasons:
• It controls all hardware devices, such as network, storage, and graphics
adapters, and is also responsible for physical memory allocation to the
partitions.
• It requests the hypervisor to create and delete partitions (referred to as
child partitions ). This activity is performed by the virtualization stack that
runs in the parent partition.
Because the root and parent partitions are one and the same in Windows
Server 2008 Hyper-V, all Dell solutions guides for Hyper-V will refer to it as the
Parent Partition.
Unlike the parent partition, child partitions do not have access to physical
hardware. When a VM is created, the VM is assigned a newly created child
partition and a set of virtual devices that do not have direct access to the
physical hardware. Instead I/O requests from the VM are routed through the
parent partition to the physical adapters on the system.