How do UEFI and virtual machines relate to each other

uefivirtual-machines

I am trying to get my head around UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and it's not entirely clear to me how this affects virtual machines.

Thus, there are three parts to this question:

Is UEFI an advance in hardware support for virtualization?
All other things being equal, would a machine with UEFI be more likely to run a virtual machine more efficiently than one without, or does UEFI cause any performance hits that negate any speed improvements from a virtual machine?
Would the difference in execution be visible to code running in a virtual machine? (In theory, it shouldn't, but in practice?)

Best Answer

UEFI shouldn't add any efficiencies all by itself, since BIOS and UEFI are there to bootstrap a system from bare CPU to an OS, and provide a translation layer between the OS and the hardware once things are booted. UEFI has a lot more capabilities in this regard.

It is entirely possible that VMWare (and the other VM vendors) will develop a hypervisor that runs directly from UEFI. Right now, it launches the hypervisor the same way it would a normal OS. Would running directly in UEFI be more efficient? Possibly, though probably not by much.

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Virtual Machines – Safe Range of MAC Addresses for Virtual Machines

There are actually 4 sets of Locally Administered Address Ranges that can be used on your network without fear of conflict, assuming no one else has assigned these on your network:

x2-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
x6-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xA-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
xE-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx

Replacing x with any hex value.

How to make a DHCP server on virtual machine serves other virtual machines(on different physical machines)

Your proposed set up will be a huge pain to implement the way you describe.

You can save yourself a headache if your physical machines have 2 physical ethernet ports. If they do, connect the 2nd port on each machine to a physical switch/router and use that physical port for the VMs. Then connect the switch/router to the internet.

Best Answer

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Virtual Machines – Safe Range of MAC Addresses for Virtual Machines

How to make a DHCP server on virtual machine serves other virtual machines(on different physical machines)

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