Cause it is installed in the VM?

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@jrack

Sorry may be i can rephrase like this: We normally do not install VirtIO when we install/create a VM in ESXi so why in Nutanix

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@Nanda



Depending of guest OS, you don't have to install VirtIO when creating a VM on AHV, since it may already have VirtIO drivers included, which is the case of some Linux distributions.



For Windows guest OS, you need to provide the VirtIO drivers when installing/creating a VM because the Windows do not include VirtIO drivers and you need them to be able to detect the SCSI controller, for instance.



Also, while in VMware you may don't need to provide drivers to install/create a VM if you use emulated devices, but if you want to use VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters and VMXNET3 network adapter, you will have to provide the drivers included in VMware Tools.

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Yeah virtio is the paravirt drivers for QEMU much like VMware tools has the paravirt for ESXi. Hypothetically you could use IDE and PCNET on those VMs as "emulated" drivers, but the speed is pretty bad.

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We use it separately for DR Replication for vm's that go from esxi cluster to an AHV cluster. We don't have the nutanix guest tools on all of vms that run on ESXi, but if they are being replicated to a cluster running AHV,we can just install the virtio drivers. Also if you are building images the you need the VirtIO drivers to get he image to boot, but the guest tools are installed after the vm is created from an image, as in our experience the nutanix guest tools are not image friendly.

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