Types of Virtual Machines and Implementations

▪ Many variations as well as HW details

• Assume VMMs take advantage of HW features
 HW features can simplify implementation, improve performance
▪ Whatever the type, a VM has a lifecycle
• Created by VMM
• Resources assigned to it (number of cores, amount of memory,
networking details, storage details)
• In type 0 hypervisor, resources usually dedicated
• Other types dedicate or share resources, or a mix
• When no longer needed, VM can be deleted, freeing resources
▪ Steps simpler, faster than with a physical machine install
• Can lead to virtual machine sprawl with lots of VMs, history and
state difficult to track
 Types of VMs – Type 0 Hypervisor
▪ Old idea, under many names by HW manufacturers
• “partitions”, “domains”
• A HW feature implemented by firmware
• OS need to nothing special, VMM is in firmware
• Smaller feature set than other types
• Each guest has dedicated HW
▪ I/O a challenge as difficult to have enough devices, controllers to
dedicate to each guest
▪ Sometimes VMM implements a control partition running daemons that
other guests communicate with for shared I/O
▪ Can provide virtualization-within-virtualization (guest itself can be a VMM
with guests
• Other types have difficulty doing this
Type 0 Hypervisor
 Types of VMs – Type 1 Hypervisor

▪ Commonly found in company datacenters

• In a sense becoming “datacenter operating systems”
 Datacenter managers control and manage OSes in new,
sophisticated ways by controlling the Type 1 hypervisor
 Consolidation of multiple OSes and apps onto less HW
 Move guests between systems to balance performance
 Snapshots and cloning
 Types of VMs – Type 1 Hypervisor (Cont.)

▪ Special purpose operating systems that run natively on HW

• Rather than providing system call interface, create run and manage
guest OSes
• Can run on Type 0 hypervisors but not on other Type 1s
• Run in kernel mode
• Guests generally don’t know they are running in a VM
• Implement device drivers for host HW because no other
component can
• Also provide other traditional OS services like CPU and memory
management
 Types of VMs – Type 1 Hypervisor (Cont.)

▪ Another variation is a general purpose OS that also provides VMM

functionality
• RedHat Enterprise Linux with KVM, Windows with Hyper-V,
Oracle Solaris
• Perform normal duties as well as VMM duties
• Typically less feature rich than dedicated Type 1 hypervisors

▪ In many ways, treat guests OSes as just another process

• Albeit with special handling when guest tries to execute
special instructions
 Types of VMs – Type 2 Hypervisor
▪ Less interesting from an OS perspective
• Very little OS involvement in virtualization
• VMM is simply another process, run and managed by host
 Even the host doesn’t know they are a VMM running guests
• Tend to have poorer overall performance because can’t take
advantage of some HW features
• But also a benefit because require no changes to host OS
 Student could have Type 2 hypervisor on native host, run
multiple guests, all on standard host OS such as Windows,
Linux, MacOS
 Types of VMs – Paravirtualization
▪ Does not fit the definition of virtualization – VMM not presenting an exact
duplication of underlying hardware
• But still useful!
• VMM provides services that guest must be modified to use
• Leads to increased performance
▪ Xen, leader in paravirtualized space, adds several techniques
• For example, clean and simple device abstractions
 Efficient I/O
 Good communication between guest and VMM about device I/O
 Each device has circular buffer shared by guest and VMM via
shared memory
Xen I/O via Shared Circular Buffer
 Types of VMs – Paravirtualization (Cont.)
▪ Xen, leader in paravirtualized space, adds several techniques (Cont.)
• Memory management does not include nested page tables
 Each guest has own read-only tables
 Guest uses hypercall (call to hypervisor) when page-table
changes needed
▪ Paravirtualization allowed virtualization of older x86 CPUs (and
others) without binary translation
▪ Guest had to be modified to use run on paravirtualized VMM
▪ But on modern CPUs Xen no longer requires guest modification ->
no longer paravirtualization
 Types of VMs – Programming Environment
Virtualization
▪ Also not-really-virtualization but using same techniques, providing similar
features
▪ Programming language is designed to run within custom-built virtualized
environment
• For example Oracle Java has many features that depend on running in
Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
▪ In this case virtualization is defined as providing APIs that define a set of
features made available to a language and programs written in that language
to provide an improved execution environment
▪ JVM compiled to run on many systems (including some smart phones)
▪ Programs written in Java run in the JVM no matter the underlying system
▪ Similar to interpreted languages
 Types of VMs – Emulation
▪ Another (older) way for running one operating system on a different OS
• Virtualization requires underlying CPU to be same as guest was
compiled for
• Emulation allows guest to run on different CPU
▪ Necessary to translate all guest instructions from guest CPU to native CPU
• Emulation, not virtualization
▪ Useful when host system has one architecture, guest compiled for
other architecture
• Company replacing outdated servers with new servers containing
different CPU architecture, but still want to run old applications
▪ Performance challenge – order of magnitude slower than native code
• New machines faster than older machines so can reduce slowdown
▪ Very popular – especially in gaming where old consoles emulated on new
 Types of VMs – Application Containment
▪ Some goals of virtualization are segregation of apps, performance and
resource management, easy start, stop, move, and management of them
▪ Can do those things without full-fledged virtualization
• If applications compiled for the host operating system, don’t need full
virtualization to meet these goals
▪ Oracle containers / zones for example create virtual layer between OS and
apps
• Only one kernel running – host OS
• OS and devices are virtualized, providing resources within zone with
impression that they are only processes on system
• Each zone has its own applications; networking stack, addresses, and
ports; user accounts, etc
• CPU and memory resources divided between zones
 Zone can have its own scheduler to use those resources
Solaris 10 with
Two Zones