Hardware drivers
We collaborate with partner organizations to provide drivers and support for a wide range of hardware. For more information, see the Hardware Compatibility List.
To support this hardware, your installation of XenServer 8 includes third-party drivers that have been certified as compatible with XenServer. A list of the drivers included in-box with your initial XenServer installation is given in the summary article Driver versions for XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor.
Updates to drivers
We regularly deliver updated versions of these drivers which can enable new hardware or resolve issues with existing hardware. Most driver updates are delivered through the updates mechanism. For more information, see Updates.
Some driver updates are released as driver disk ISO files on the website https://support.citrix.com. These drivers are listed in the summary article Driver versions for XenServer and Citrix Hypervisor.
Even though we distribute the drivers and their source code for our customers to use, the hardware vendor owns the driver source files.
Support for drivers
XenServer supports only drivers that are delivered in-box with the product or are downloaded from https://support.citrix.com. Drivers provided by third-party websites, including drivers with the same name or version number as those drivers provided by us, are not supported.
Note:
The only exception to this restriction are the drivers that NVIDIA provides to enable vGPU support. For more information, see NVIDIA vGPU.
Other drivers provided by NVIDIA, for example, the Mellanox drivers, are only supported with XenServer when distributed by us.
Do not download drivers from your hardware vendor website, even if the driver has the same version number as the one provided by XenServer. These drivers are not supported.
Before a driver can be supported with XenServer, it must be certified with us and released through one of the approved mechanisms. This certification process ensures that the driver is of a format required to be installable in a XenServer environment and that it is compatible with XenServer 8.
What if a driver I need isn’t supported?
If your hardware vendor recommends that you install a specific driver version that is not available in-box or on the https://support.citrix.com website, request that the vendor contacts us to certify this version of the driver with XenServer.
We provide the vendors with certification kits that they can use to test updated versions of their drivers that are required by the shared customer base of Citrix Hypervisor and the hardware vendor. After the vendor provides us with the certification test results, we validate that those results show no issues or regressions in the updated version of the driver. The driver version is now certified with XenServer and we publish the driver our regular updates or as a driver disk ISO on https://support.citrix.com.
For more information about the certification process the vendor must follow, see the article Hardware Compatibility List explained.