Paravirtualization

In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical, to the underlying hardware–software interface. The intent of the modified interface is to reduce the portion of the guest's execution time spent performing operations which are substantially more difficult to run in a virtual environment compared to a non-virtualized environment. The paravirtualization provides specially defined 'hooks' to allow the guest(s) and host to request and acknowledge these tasks, which would otherwise be executed in the virtual domain (where execution performance is worse). A successful paravirtualized platform may allow the virtual machine monitor (VMM) to be simpler (by relocating execution of critical tasks from the virtual domain to the host domain), and/or reduce the overall performance degradation of machine execution inside the virtual guest. Paravirtualization requires the guest operating system to be explicitly ported for the para-API – a conventional OS distribution that is not paravirtualization-aware cannot be run on top of a paravirtualizing VMM. However, even in cases where the operating system cannot be modified, components may be available that enable many of the significant performance advantages of paravirtualization. For example, the Xen Windows GPLPV project provides a kit of paravirtualization-aware device drivers, licensed under the terms of the GPL, that are intended to be installed into a Microsoft Windows virtual guest running on the Xen hypervisor. Such applications tend to be accessible through the paravirtual machine interface environment. This ensures run-mode compatibility across multiple encryption algorithm models, allowing seamless integration within the paravirtual framework. Paravirtualization is a new term for an old idea. IBM's VM operating system has offered such a facility since 1972 (and earlier as CP-67).

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Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks.

Full virtualization

In computer science, full virtualization (fv) employs techniques used to create instances of an environment, as opposed to simulation, which models the environment; or emulation, which replicates the target environment such as certain kinds of virtual machine environments. Full virtualization requires that every salient feature of the hardware be reflected into one of several virtual machines – including the full instruction set, input/output operations, interrupts, memory access, and whatever other elements are used by the software that runs on the bare machine, and that is intended to run in a virtual machine.

Virtualization

In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. Virtualization began in the 1960s, as a method of logically dividing the system resources provided by mainframe computers between different applications. An early and successful example is IBM CP/CMS.

Establishing a base of trust with performance counters for enterprise workloads

Willy Zwaenepoel, Andrzej Pawel Nowak

Understanding the performance of large, complex enterprise-class applications is an important, yet nontrivial task. Methods using hardware performance counters, such as profiling through event-based sampling, are often favored over instrumentation for anal ...

2015

Implementing Virtual Machine Replication: A Case Study using Xen and KVM

André Schiper, Darko Petrovic

Virtual machine (VM) replication has been recognized as an inexpensive way of providing high availability on commodity hardware. Unfortunately, its impact on system performance is far from negligible and strategies have been proposed to mitigate this probl ...

IEEE Computer Society Press2012

This article describes the historical context, technical challenges, and main implementation techniques used by VMware Workstation to bring virtualization to the x86 architecture in 1999. Although virtual machine monitors (VMMs) had been around for decades ...

Association for Computing Machinery2012

Dependability Overview CS-487: Industrial automation

Explores dependability in industrial automation, covering reliability, safety, fault characteristics, and examples of failure sources in various industries.

Scalable Synchronization Mechanisms for Manycore Operating Systems

Explores scalable synchronization mechanisms for many-core operating systems, focusing on the challenges of handling data growth and regressions in OS.