OS Virtualization Principles

Principles

Applications of OS Virtualization

Wide range of use cases:

Virtual Machines and Hardware

Ideally virtualization is transparent to guest OSes

4 ways to run i386 OS guests

How to circumvent the lack of virtualization support

Paravirtualization and Xen

Xen comes from the University of Cambridge

Do not hide the virtualization from the guest OSes

Xen's performances

Borrowed from their paper at SOSP in 2003

comparative performances of Xen on bencharks

Xen's performances II

Borrowed from 2005 presentation at OLS

comparative performances of Xen on bencharks

Xen's performances III

Borrowed from 2005 presentation at OLS

comparative performances of Xen on bencharks

Xen for Linux

Xen is been integrated in Linux upstream ... slowly

Xen Architecture

multiple domain running in Xen

Current state

Xen is still a work in progress:

Features

Core functionalities are here

[*] assuming conditions are met

Xen's migration data

Borrowed from this year presentation at OLS

bandwidth served by a web server being migrated

Still a work in progress

Virtualization in general is moving fast

Red Hat involvement

Stabilize, stabilize, stabilize ...

Useful Links

Fedora Xen Kickstart

Fedora Virtualization

Xen FAQ Wiki

Cambridge Lab. Xen page

XenSource

Questions ?

Come see the demo