Reviewing the World of Virtualization

Abstract

The latest talk in IT industry is about server virtualization. Virtualization increase server utilization rates. Along with this, it lets you consolidate multiple operating systems and applications as per physical server and deploy new applications in minutes. The benefits in utilization, energy savings, manageability, service levels and cost models can be dramatic. If we come to concept of actual machine depends on various companies developing it, like Intel, Microsoft, IBM's, and Cisco etc. If we come to Microsoft application i.e. an OSlevel virtual machine architecture for Windows applications called Feather-weight Virtual Machine (FVM), under which virtual machines share as many resources of the host machine as possible while still isolated from one another and from the host machine. The key technique behind FVM is namespace virtualization, which isolates virtual machines by renaming resources at the OS system call interface. Through a copy-on write scheme, FVM allows multiple virtual machines to physically share resources but logically isolate their resources from each other. A main technical challenge in FVM is how to achieve strong isolation among different virtual machines and the host machine, due to numerous namespaces and inter process communication mechanisms on Windows. What forms the internal core components of the Virtual Machine system? We can consider them as layers such as hardware, Host Operating system, Virtual Machine Monitor, Application parts(no. of OS installed).