1 About Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows

The Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows are paravirtualized drivers for Microsoft Windows guests that run on KVM hypervisors; these drivers improve performance for network and block (disk) devices on Microsoft Windows guests and resolve common issues.

Features in 2.3.1

The Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows 2.3.1 includes enhancements to the vioscsi driver to fix an issue that caused page read errors that resulted in Microsoft SQL Server failure.

Features in 2.3

The Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows 2.3 provides new support for Microsoft Windows Server 2025.

Features in 2.2

The Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows 2.2 provides:

  • New features:
    • Enables the VirtIO balloon driver so the host can reclaim memory from the guest.
    • Changes the ISO driver folder layout to let the installer automatically load the correct driver, detect the virtual disks, and resume installation.
  • Bug fix - VirtIO installer and service updated to support:
    • Support non-KVM to KVM migration for Windows guests that use PC and Q35 machine types.
    • Support installing and upgrading VirtIO drivers for PCI and PCIe devices.

Features in 2.1.0

The Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows 2.1.0 provides:

  • An updated installer which includes better messaging and improved workflows for unsupported platforms.
  • Support for the VirtIO GPU driver that drives the VirtIO VGA display device designed for virtual machines. VirtIO GPU supports system power state S3. You can suspend and wake up the Windows system that uses the VirtIO VGA device.
  • Bug fixes for the VirtIO storage and network drivers.

Features in 2.0.1

Release 2.0.1 of the Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows fixes an issue that caused migration failure when changing from non-KVM environments, such as VMWare or Hyper-V, to KVM environments, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Features in 2.0

The primary focus in release 2.0 of the Oracle VirtIO Drivers for Microsoft Windows is an improvement in network and block performance. Also, a significant number of bugs are resolved in this update and the codebase aligns more closely to the upstream release of these drivers. The update also facilitates the coexistence of third-party vendor drivers that previously resulted in conflicts and issues.