The Cisco IOS XRv Router is hypervisor agnostic. The demo image, which is provided without support, is
suitable for use on a laptop or on a server which meets the requirements outlined below. For simulation, the
supported hypervisors are VMWare ESXi 5.0 or later or QEMU 1.0. For production, VMWare ESXi 5.0 or
later is the only supported hypervisor. See below for more information on VMWare ESXi and QEMU:
• VMware ESXi 5.0 and higher—VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are bare-metal embedded hypervisors
from VMware's enterprise software for guest virtual servers that run directly on host server hardware
without requiring an additional underlying operating system.
• QEMU 1.0—Quick EMUlator (QEMU) is a free and open-source software product that performs
hardware virtualization. QEMU is a hosted virtual machine monitor. It emulates central processing units
through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of device models, enabling it to run a variety of
unmodified guest operating systems. It also provides an accelerated mode for supporting a mixture of
binary translation (for kernel code) and native execution (for user code), in the same fashion VMware
Workstation and VirtualBox do. QEMU can also be used mainly for CPU emulation for user-level
processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to be run on another. Kernel-based Virtual
Machine (KVM) is virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel that QEMU can use to improve
performance. KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extension.
