1. A method of conveying a data packet received from a network to a virtual machine instantiated on a computer system coupled to the network, the method being implemented by a virtualization kernel component of virtualization software for execution on the computer system, the method comprising: inspecting a guest receive pointer queue of a component executing in the virtual machine to identify a location in a guest receive packet data buffer that is available to receive packet data; copying data from the data packet received from the network into the guest receive packet data buffer at the location identified in the guest receive pointer queue as being available; raising a standard receive interrupt to the virtual machine; and whereby the kernel places the data packet received from the network into a memory space accessible to the virtual machine without any intervention by a virtual machine monitor component of the virtualization software.