Blog Post

Windows OS Platform Blog
9 MIN READ

OpenHCL: the new, open source paravisor

Caroline_Perezvargas's avatar
Caroline_Perezvargas
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 17, 2024

Microsoft developed the first paravisor in the industry, and for years, we have been enhancing the paravisor offered to Azure customers. In this blog, we announce the release of a new, open source paravisor, called OpenHCL.

Intro From the beginning of the cloud computing era, virtualization technology has enabled compute workloads to run as virtual machines (VMs) in a server environment. As hardware has evolved, and n...
Caroline_Perezvargas_0-1729182347163.png
Updated Aug 21, 2026
Version 13.0
virtualization
vodevil1985's avatar
vodevil1985
Copper Contributor
Nov 25, 2025

Hello Caroline,

I currently integrating firecracker to run third party code securly i want to offer to clients the capability of running their code on Windows so they can write plugins targeting this platform. Is openhcl (OpenVMM), capable to doing the same thing as firecracker ? For control plane of firecracker i just write a bunch of bash scripts and a dotnet app to orchestrate, building volumes, format, copy workload etc. then run everything with jailer.

 

Do openvmm allows for shared rootfs, with copy on write like firecracker ?

 

Thank you.