UNDERSTANDING

HYPERVISORS
 Objective

• Describing a hypervisor
• Understanding the role of a hypervisor
• Comparing today’s hypervisors
 Describing a Hypervisor
• A hypervisor is an arbiter of resources.
• It is software that sits between the physical resources on
a physical server and the virtual machines that run on
that server.
• In addition to resource allocation, hypervisors provide a
virtual environment for those workloads, enable virtual
networks for communication between workloads and to the
outside world, and offer various forms of clustering for high
availability.
• Hypervisors allow us to make better use of the ever-faster
processors that regularly appear in the commercial market
• Efficiently use the larger and denser memory offerings
that come along with those newer processors.
 Describing a Hypervisor

• Hypervisor is a layer of software

that resides below the virtual
machines and above the hardware.
• Withouta hypervisor, an operating
system communicates directly
with the hardware beneath it.
• Without a hypervisor, more than
one operating system from
multiple virtual machines would
want simultaneous control of the
hardware.
 Why Call It a “Hypervisor”?

• Initially,the problem that the engineers were trying to

solve was one of resource allocation, trying to utilize areas
of memory that were not normally accessible to
programmers.
• The code they produced was successful and was dubbed a
hypervisor because, at the time, operating systems were
called supervisors and this code could supersede them.
 A virtual machine monitor

• The structure of a VMM is fairly

simple.
• It consists of a layer of software
• That lives between the
hardware, or host, and the
virtual machines that it
supports.
• These virtual machines, or VMs,
which you will learn more about in
the next chapter, are also called
guests.
 Understanding Type 1 Hypervisors
•A Type 1 hypervisor runs directly on the server
hardware without an operating system beneath it.
• Becausethere is no other intervening layer of software
between the hypervisor and the physical hardware.
• Also referred to as a bare-metal implementation.
• Without an intermediary, the Type 1 hypervisor can
directly
communicate with the hardware resources in the stack
below it, making it much more efficient than the Type 2
hypervisor.
 Understanding Type 1 Hypervisors
• Type 1 hypervisors are also considered to be more secure than Type 2
hypervisors.
• Guest operations are handed off and, as such, a guest cannot affect
the hypervisor on which it is supported.
• A virtual machine can damage only itself, causing a single guest crash,
but that event does not escape the VM boundaries.
• Other guests continue processing, and the hypervisor is unaffected
as well. A malicious guest, where code is deliberately trying to interfere
with the hypervisor or the other guests, would be unable to do so.
 Understanding Type 2 Hypervisors
•A Type 2 hypervisor itself is an
application that runs on top of a
traditional operating system.
• The first x86 offerings were Type 2
because that was the quickest path to
market.
• The actual operating system already
handled all of the hardware resources
and the hypervisor would leverage
that capability.
 Understanding Type 2 Hypervisors
• One benefit of this model is that it can support a large
range of hardware because that is inherited from the
operating system it uses.
• Often Type 2 hypervisors are easy to install and deploy
because much of the hardware configuration work, such
as networking and storage, has already been covered
by the operating system.
• Type 2 hypervisors are not as efficient as Type 1
hypervisors because of this extra layer between the
hypervisor itself and the hardware.
 Understanding Type 2 Hypervisors

• Type 2 hypervisors are also less reliable because there are

more points of failure.
• Anything that affects the availability of the underlying
operating system also can impact the hypervisor and
the guests it supports.
• For example, standard operating system patches that require
a system reboot would also force reboots of all the
virtual machines on that host.
 Understanding the Role of a
Hypervisor
• It is a layer of software that sits between the hardware
and the one or more virtual machines that it supports.
Its job is also fairly simple. The three characteristics defined
by Popek and Goldberg illustrate these tasks:
▶ Provide an environment identical to the physical
environment.
▶ Provide that environment with minimal performance cost.
▶ Retain complete control of the system resources.
Abstracting hardware from the guests
 Resource Allocation
• A hypervisor has become an operating system of sorts for
the hardware, but instead of dealing with
application/program requests, the hypervisor services
entire (virtual) servers.
• A guest application calls for a disk read and passes that
request to the guest operating system. The guest
operating system makes a read to the disk that it sees, shown
in the illustration as the C: or D: drive.
• When the response returns, the hypervisor passes the
data back to the guest operating system, which receives
it as if it came directly from the physical device.
 VMware ESX
• Founded in 1998, VMware was the first company to develop a
commercially available x86 virtualization solution.
• The following year, the company released their first product,
Workstation 1.0, which allowed developers to create
and work with virtual machines on their Windows or
Linux desktops.
• ESXwas a Type 1 hypervisor and GSX was a Type 2
hypervisor.
• Bothsolutions are still around today and are still being
enhanced and updated.
The ESXi architecture
 Citrix Xen
• The Xen hypervisor began as a research project in the late
1990s at the University of Cambridge, the goal of which was
to create an efficient platform for distributed computing.
• The Xen model has a special guest called Domain 0, also
referred to as Dom0.
• Thisguest gets booted when the hypervisor is booted,
and it has management privileges different from the other
guests.
• Because it has direct access to the hardware, it handles
all of the I/O for the individual guests. It also handles the
hardware device driver support.
The Xen hypervisor architecture
 Microsoft Hyper-V
• Microsoft began in the virtualization space with Virtual
Server in 2005, after they had acquired the solution from
Connectix a few years earlier.
• Hyper-V is a Type 1 hypervisor because the hypervisor
code lives directly on the hardware.
• The nomenclature is slightly different, though rather than
guests, the virtualized workloads are called partitions.
• Similar to the Xen model, it requires a special parent
partition that has direct access to the hardware
resources.
Microsoft Hyper-V architecture
 Class Assignment

• KVM-Kernel Based Virtual Machine

• VT-x
• What’s The Difference: Hoststate vs. Gueststate in
virtulization.