Department of CSE
CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE AND
SERVICES
23CEC3101R
Topic:
FULL VIRTUALIZATION
Session - 12
CREATED BY K. VICTOR BABU
AIM OF THE SESSION
To familiarize students with VMware virtualization techniques
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
This Session is designed to:
1. List out the difference between full and paravirtualization
2. Explore Binary translation approach
LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of this session, you should be able to:
1. Summarize the full and paravirtualization
2. Know the best practices of virtualization
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x86 Hardware Virtualization
• The x86 architecture offers four levels of privilege known as Ring 0, 1, 2 and 3 to
operating systems and applications to manage access to the computer hardware.
While user level applications typically run in Ring 3, the operating system needs
to have direct access to the memory and hardware and must execute its
privileged instructions in Ring 0.
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Technique 1: Full Virtualization using Binary Translation
• This approach relies on binary translation to trap (into the VMM) and to
virtualize certain sensitive and non-virtualizable instructions with new
sequences of instructions that have the intended effect on the virtual
hardware. Meanwhile, user level code is directly executed on the
processor for high performance virtualization.
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Full Virtualization using Binary Translation
• This combination of binary translation and direct execution
provides Full Virtualization as the guest OS is completely
decoupled from the underlying hardware by the virtualization
layer.
• The guest OS is not aware it is being virtualized and requires no
modification.
• The hypervisor translates all operating system instructions at
run-time on the fly and caches the results for future use, while
user level instructions run unmodified at native speed.
• VMware’s virtualization products such as VMWare ESXi and
CREATED BY K. VICTOR BABU Microsoft Virtual Server are examples of full virtualization.
Full Virtualization using Binary Translation
• The performance of full virtualization may not be ideal because it
involves binary translation at run-time which is time consuming and can
incur a large performance overhead.
• The full virtualization of I/O – intensive applications can be a challenge.
• Binary translation employs a code cache to store translated hot
instructions to improve performance, but it increases the cost of
memory usage.
• The performance of full virtualization on the x86 architecture is typically
80% to 97% that of the host machine.
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Technique 2: OS Assisted Virtualization or Paravirtualization (PV)
• Paravirtualization refers to communication between the guest OS and the hypervisor
to improve performance and efficiency.
• Paravirtualization involves modifying the OS kernel to replace nonvirtualizable
instructions with hypercalls that communicate directly with the virtualization layer
hypervisor.
• The hypervisor also provides hypercall
interfaces for other critical kernel
operations such as memory
management, interrupt
handling and time keeping.
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Technique 3: Hardware Assisted Virtualization (HVM)
• Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT-x) (e.g. Intel Xeon) and AMD’s AMD-V both target privileged instructions
with a new CPU execution mode feature that allows the VMM to run in a new root mode below ring 0, also
referred to as Ring 0P (for privileged root mode) while the Guest OS runs in Ring 0D (for de-privileged non-root
mode).
• Privileged and sensitive calls are
set to automatically trap to the
hypervisor and handled by
hardware, removing the need
for either binary translation or
para-virtualization.
• Vmware only takes advantage
of these first generation
hardware features in limited
cases such as for 64-bit guest
support on Intel processors.
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Summary Comparison of the Current
State of x86 Virtualization Techniques
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Full Virtualization vs. Paravirtualization
• Paravirtualization is different from full virtualization, where the unmodified
OS does not know it is virtualized and sensitive OS calls are trapped using
binary translation at run time. In paravirtualization, these instructions are
handled at compile time when the non-virtualizable OS instructions are
replaced with hypercalls.
• The advantage of paravirtualization is lower virtualization overhead, but the
performance advantage of paravirtualization over full virtualization can vary
greatly depending on the workload. Most user space workloads gain very
little, and near native performance is not achieved for all workloads.
• As paravirtualization cannot support unmodified operating systems (e.g.
Windows 2000/XP), its compatibility and portability is poor.
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Full Virtualization vs. Paravirtualization
• Paravirtualization can also introduce significant support and
maintainability issues in production environments as it requires deep
OS kernel modifications. The invasive kernel modifications tightly
couple the guest OS to the hypervisor with data structure
dependencies, preventing the modified guest OS from running on
other hypervisors or native hardware.
• The open source Xen project is an example of paravirtualization that
virtualizes the processor and memory using a modified Linux kernel
and virtualizes the I/O using custom guest OS device drivers.
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Memory Virtualization
• This involves sharing the physical system memory and dynamically
allocating it to virtual machines. VM memory virtualization is very
similar to the virtual memory support provided by modern operating
systems.
• The operating system keeps mappings of virtual page numbers to
physical page numbers stored in page tables. All modern x86 CPUs
include a memory management unit (MMU) and a translation
lookaside buffer (TLB) to optimize virtual memory performance.
• To run multiple virtual machines on a single system, another level of
memory virtualization is required. In other words, one has to
virtualize the MMU to support the guest OS.
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Memory Virtualization
• The guest OS continues to control the mapping of virtual addresses to the guest
memory physical addresses, but the guest OS cannot have direct access to the
actual machine memory.
• The VMM is responsible for mapping guest physical memory to the actual machine
memory, and it uses shadow page tables to accelerate the mappings.
• The VMM uses TLB hardware to map the virtual memory directly to the machine
memory to avoid the two levels of translation on every access.
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I/O Virtualization
• I/O Virtualization involves managing the routing of I/O requests between virtual
devices and the shared physical hardware.
• The hypervisor virtualizes the physical hardware and presents each virtual machine
with a standardized set of virtual devices.
• These virtual devices effectively emulate well-known hardware (with device drivers)
and translate the virtual machine requests to the system hardware.
• This standardization on consistent device drivers also helps with virtual machine
standardization and portability across platforms as all virtual machines are
configured to run on the same virtual hardware regardless of the actual physical
hardware in the system.
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I/O Virtualization in Xen: Indirect driver model
• Xen uses an indirect driver design that routes virtual machine I/O through device
drivers in the Windows or Linux management operating systems.
• Xen uses an indirect split driver model consisting of a front-end driver running in
Domain U (user VMs) and the backend driver running in Domain 0. These two
drivers interact with each other via a block of shared memory.
• The front-end driver manages the I/O requests of the guest OS and the backend
driver is responsible for managing the real I/O devices and multiplexing the I/O data
of different VMs. These generic (standard) backend drivers installed in Linux or
Windows OS can be overtaxed by the activity of multiple virtual machines and
are not optimized for multiple VM workloads.
• There is also CPU overhead associated
with this approach because I/O is proxied
via Domain 0.
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I/O Virtualization in VMWare ESXi: Direct driver model
• ESXi uses a direct driver model that locates the device drivers that link virtual
machines to physical devices directly in the ESXi hypervisor.
• With the drivers in the hypervisor, VMware ESXi uses optimized and hardened
device drivers and provides special treatment, in the form of CPU scheduling and
memory resources, that they need to process I/O loads from multiple virtual
machines.
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Scalability of VMWare and Xen driver models
• VMware direct driver model scales better than the indirect driver model in Xen.
• As shown in the chart below, Xen, which uses the indirect driver model, shows a
severe I/O bottleneck with just three concurrent virtual machines, while
VMware ESX continues to scale I/O throughput as virtual machines are added.
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THANK YOU
Team – Cloud Infrastructure and Services
CREATED BY K. VICTOR BABU