Red Hat Virtualization's paravirtualization mode allows you to utilize high performance virtualization on architectures that are potentially difficult to virtualize such as x86 based systems. To deploy para-virtualization across your operating system(s), you need access to the paravirtual guest kernels that are available from a repective Red Hat distro (for example, RHEL 4.0, RHEL 5.0, etc.). Whilst your operating system kernels must support Red Hat Virtualization, it is not necessary to modify user applications or libraries.

Red Hat Virtualization allows you to run an unmodified guest kernel if you have Intel VT and AMD SVM CPU hardware. You do not have to port your operating system to deploy this architecture on your Intel VT or AMD SVM systems. Red Hat Virtualization supports:

To run full virtualization guests on systems with Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine (HVM), Intel, or AMD platforms, you must check to ensure your CPUs have the capabilities needed to do so.

To check if you have the CPU flags for Intel support, enter the following:

grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo 

The output displays:

flags   :  fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall  nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm 

If a vmx flag appears then you have Intel support.

To check if you have the CPU flags for AMD support, enter the following:

grep svm /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep vmx   

The output displays:

flags   :  fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dt acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx mmtext fxsr_opt  rdtscp lm 3dnowext  pni  cx16  lahf_lm  cmp_legacy  svm  cr8_legacy  

If an svm flag appears then you have AMD support.