VMware, Inc. today announced the general availability of its latest Workstation product, version 6.0. Along with that announcement, the company also announced that it was supporting cross-platform paravirtualization with the open-interface standard paravirt-ops. VMware typically uses its Workstation product as a proving ground for new technology. And so, like many additional features and technologies before it, VMware, Inc. today announced the general availability of its latest Workstation product, version 6.0. Along with that announcement, the company also announced that it was supporting cross-platform paravirtualization with the open-interface standard paravirt-ops. VMware typically uses its Workstation product as a proving ground for new technology. And so, like many additional features and technologies before it, paravirt-ops is being added into Workstation before any of VMware’s other platforms, and therefore becomes the first commercially available virtualization product to support the new technology. Paravirtualized Linux operating systems are modified operating systems specifically optimized to run in a virtual environment. Unlike current paravirtualization technologies, paravirt-ops enables transparent paravirtualization, which allows users to run the same Linux kernel in paravirtualized mode on a hypervisor as well as on native hardware. As a result, organizations have to support and maintain fewer Linux kernels, saving management costs and simplifying application development. Paravirt-ops is an open interface developed through a community process that included collaboration from the Linux community as well commercial vendors IBM, Red Hat, VMware and XenSource. Paravirt-ops was included in the latest version of the Linux kernel (version 2.6.20) and includes support for the VMware VMI interface, which provides a hypervisor-agnostic paravirtualization interface. “Interoperability and open interfaces are a major focus for VMware,” said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. “VMware support for paravirtualization through the paravirt-ops interface demonstrates our commitment to working with open communities such as Linux and with other leading vendors to achieve open interoperability and optimizations for end users.” VMware becomes the first of the paravirt-ops proponents to offer support for the new interface in a commercially available product. According to XenSource, they are close to providing support for the technology in their product as well. Virtualization competitor Virtual Iron on the other hand appears to be satisfied with hardware accelerated virtualization provided by Intel and AMD rather than using paravirt-ops and touching the kernel in any way. Software Development