Some devices, such as sound cards, may not work as expected in hardware virtualized guests. In a hardware virtualized guest, a device that requires physical memory addresses instead uses virtualized memory addresses, so incorrect memory location values may be set. This is because DMA (Direct Memory Access) is virtualized in hardware virtualized guests.

Hardware virtualized guest operating systems expect to be loaded in memory starting somewhere around address 0 and upwards. This is only possible for the first hardware virtualized guest loaded. Oracle VM Server virtualizes the memory address to be 0 to the size of allocated memory, but the guest operating system is actually loaded at another memory location. The difference is fixed up in the shadow page table, but the operating system is unaware of this.

For example, a sound is loaded into memory in a hardware virtualized guest running Windows at an address of 100MB may produce garbage through the sound card, instead of the intended audio. This is because the sound is actually loaded at 100MB plus 256MB. The sound card receives the address of 100MB, but it is actually at 256MB.

An IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit) in the computer's memory management unit would remove this problem as it would take care of mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses, and enable hardware virtualized guests direct access to the hardware.