Virtual Machines

Chapter 16: Virtual Machines

• Overview
• History
• Benefits and Features
• Building Blocks
• Types of Virtual Machines and Their Implementations
• Virtualization and Operating-System Components
• Examples
Chapter Objectives

• To explore the history and benefits of virtual machines

• To discuss the various virtual machine technologies
• To describe the methods used to implement virtualization
• To show the most common hardware features that support
virtualization and explain how they are used by operating-
system modules
Overview
• Fundamental idea – abstract hardware of a single computer into
several different execution environments
• Similar to layered approach
• But layer creates virtual system (virtual machine, or VM) on which
operation systems or applications can run
• Several components
• Host – underlying hardware system
• Virtual machine manager (VMM) or hypervisor – creates and runs virtual
machines by providing interface that is identical to the host
• (Except in the case of paravirtualization)
• Guest – process provided with virtual copy of the host
• Usually an operating system
• Single physical machine can run multiple operating systems
concurrently, each in its own virtual machine
System Models

Non-virtual machine Virtual machine

Implementation of VMMs
• Vary greatly, with options including:
• Type 0 hypervisors - Hardware-based solutions that provide support for
virtual machine creation and management via firmware
• IBM LPARs and Oracle LDOMs are examples
• Type 1 hypervisors - Operating-system-like software built to provide
virtualization
• Including VMware ESX, Joyent SmartOS, and Citrix XenServer
• Type 1 hypervisors – Also includes general-purpose operating systems that
provide standard functions as well as VMM functions
• Including Microsoft Windows Server with HyperV and RedHat Linux with KVM
• Type 2 hypervisors - Applications that run on standard operating systems
but provide VMM features to guest operating systems
• Includeing VMware Workstation and Fusion, Parallels Desktop, and Oracle
VirtualBox
Implementation of VMMs (cont.)

• Other variations include:

• Paravirtualization - Technique in which the guest operating system is modified to
work in cooperation with the VMM to optimize performance
• Programming-environment virtualization - VMMs do not virtualize real hardware
but instead create an optimized virtual system
• Used by Oracle Java and Microsoft.Net
• Emulators – Allow applications written for one hardware environment to run on a
very different hardware environment, such as a different type of CPU
• Application containment - Not virtualization at all but rather provides virtualization-
like features by segregating applications from the operating system, making them
more secure, manageable
• Including Oracle Solaris Zones, BSD Jails, and IBM AIX WPARs
• Much variation due to breadth, depth and importance of
virtualization in modern computing
History
• First appeared in IBM mainframes in 1972
• Allowed multiple users to share a batch-oriented system
• Formal definition of virtualization helped move it beyond IBM
1.A VMM provides an environment for programs that is essentially
identical to the original machine
2.Programs running within that environment show only minor
performance decreases
3.The VMM is in complete control of system resources
• In late 1990s Intel CPUs fast enough for researchers to try
virtualizing on general purpose PCs
• Xen and VMware created technologies, still used today
• Virtualization has expanded to many OSes, CPUs, VMMs
Benefits and Features
• Host system protected from VMs, VMs protected from each
other
• I.e. A virus less likely to spread
• Sharing is provided though via shared file system volume, network
communication
• Freeze, suspend, running VM
• Then can move or copy somewhere else and resume
• Snapshot of a given state, able to restore back to that state
• Some VMMs allow multiple snapshots per VM
• Clone by creating copy and running both original and copy
• Great for OS research, better system development efficiency
• Run multiple, different OSes on a single machine
• Consolidation, app dev, …
Benefits and Features (cont.)

• Templating – create an OS + application VM, provide it to

customers, use it to create multiple instances of that
combination
• Live migration – move a running VM from one host to
another!
• No interruption of user access
• All those features taken together -> cloud computing
• Using APIs, programs tell cloud infrastructure (servers, networking,
storage) to create new guests, VMs, virtual desktops
Building Blocks

n Generally difficult to provide an exact duplicate of underlying

machine
l Especially if only dual-mode operation available on CPU
l But getting easier over time as CPU features and support for VMM
improves
l Most VMMs implement virtual CPU (VCPU) to represent state of CPU
per guest as guest believes it to be
When guest context switched onto CPU by VMM, information from VCPU
loaded and stored
l Several techniques, as described in next slides
 Building Block – Trap and Emulate

• Dual mode CPU means guest executes in user mode

• Kernel runs in kernel mode
• Not safe to let guest kernel run in kernel mode too
• So VM needs two modes – virtual user mode and virtual kernel
mode
• Both of which run in real user mode
• Actions in guest that usually cause switch to kernel mode must cause
switch to virtual kernel mode
Trap-and-Emulate (cont.)
• How does switch from virtual user mode to virtual kernel mode
occur?
• Attempting a privileged instruction in user mode causes an error -> trap
• VMM gains control, analyzes error, executes operation as attempted by
guest
• Returns control to guest in user mode
• Known as trap-and-emulate
• Most virtualization products use this at least in part
• User mode code in guest runs at same speed as if not a guest
• But kernel mode privilege mode code runs slower due to trap-
and-emulate
• Especially a problem when multiple guests running, each needing trap-
and-emulate
• CPUs adding hardware support, mode CPU modes to improve
virtualization performance
Trap-and-Emulate Virtualization Implementation
 Building Block – Binary Translation

• Some CPUs don’t have clean separation between privileged

and nonprivileged instructions
• Earlier Intel x86 CPUs are among them
• Earliest Intel CPU designed for a calculator
• Backward compatibility means difficult to improve
• Consider Intel x86 popf instruction
• Loads CPU flags register from contents of the stack
• If CPU in privileged mode -> all flags replaced
• If CPU in user mode -> on some flags replaced
• No trap is generated
Binary Translation (cont.)

Other similar problem instructions we will call special instructions

Caused trap-and-emulate method considered impossible until 1998
Binary translation solves the problem
Basics are simple, but implementation very complex
1. If guest VCPU is in user mode, guest can run instructions natively
2. If guest VCPU in kernel mode (guest believes it is in kernel mode)
1. VMM examines every instruction guest is about to execute by reading a few
instructions ahead of program counter
2. Non-special-instructions run natively
3. Special instructions translated into new set of instructions that perform equivalent
task (for example changing the flags in the VCPU)
Binary Translation (cont.)
Implemented by translation of code within VMM
Code reads native instructions dynamically from guest, on
demand, generates native binary code that executes in place of
original code
Performance of this method would be poor without
optimizations
Products like VMware use caching
Translate once, and when guest executes code containing special instruction
cached translation used instead of translating again
Testing showed booting Windows XP as guest caused 950,000 translations, at 3
microseconds each, or 3 second (5 %) slowdown over native
Binary Translation Virtualization Implementation
Nested Page Tables
• Memory management another general challenge to VMM implementations
• How can VMM keep page-table state for both guests believing they control the page
tables and VMM that does control the tables?
• Common method (for trap-and-emulate and binary translation) is nested page tables
(NPTs)
• Each guest maintains page tables to translate virtual to physical addresses
• VMM maintains per guest NPTs to represent guest’s page-table state
• Just as VCPU stores guest CPU state
• When guest on CPU -> VMM makes that guest’s NPTs the active system page
tables
• Guest tries to change page table -> VMM makes equivalent change to NPTs and its
own page tables
• Can cause many more TLB misses -> much slower performance
 Building Blocks – Hardware Assistance

• All virtualization needs some HW support

• More support -> more feature rich, stable, better performance of
guests
• Intel added new VT-x instructions in 2005 and AMD the AMD-V
instructions in 2006
• CPUs with these instructions remove need for binary translation
• Generally define more CPU modes – “guest” and “host”
• VMM can enable host mode, define characteristics of each guest VM, switch to
guest mode and guest(s) on CPU(s)
• In guest mode, guest OS thinks it is running natively, sees devices (as defined by
VMM for that guest)
• Access to virtualized device, priv instructions cause trap to VMM
• CPU maintains VCPU, context switches it as needed
• HW support for Nested Page Tables, DMA, interrupts as well over
time
Nested Page Tables
 Types of Virtual Machines and Implementations

n Many variations as well as HW details

l Assume VMMs take advantage of HW features
HW features can simplify implementation, improve performance
n Whatever the type, a VM has a lifecycle
l Created by VMM
l Resources assigned to it (number of cores, amount of memory, networking
details, storage details)
l In type 0 hypervisor, resources usually dedicated
l Other types dedicate or share resources, or a mix
l When no longer needed, VM can be deleted, freeing resouces
n Steps simpler, faster than with a physical machine install
l 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
• 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
• Less needed as hardware support for VMs grows
• 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 even)
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 operating
system
• 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
Virtualization and Operating-System Components

Now look at operating system aspects of virtualization

CPU scheduling, memory management, I/O, storage, and unique VM
migration feature
How do VMMs schedule CPU use when guests believe they have dedicated
CPUs?
How can memory management work when many guests require large amounts
of memory?
OS Component – CPU Scheduling
Even single-CPU systems act like multiprocessor ones when
virtualized
One or more virtual CPUs per guest
Generally VMM has one or more physical CPUs and number of
threads to run on them
Guests configured with certain number of VCPUs
Can be adjusted throughout life of VM
When enough CPUs for all guests -> VMM can allocate dedicated CPUs,
each guest much like native operating system managing its CPUs
Usually not enough CPUs -> CPU overcommitment
VMM can use standard scheduling algorithms to put threads on CPUs
Some add fairness aspect
 OS Component – CPU Scheduling (cont.)

• Cycle stealing by VMM and oversubscription of CPUs

means guests don’t get CPU cycles they expect
• Consider timesharing scheduler in a guest trying to schedule
100ms time slices -> each may take 100ms, 1 second, or longer
• Poor response times for users of guest
• Time-of-day clocks incorrect
• Some VMMs provide application to run in each guest to fix time-
of-day and provide other integration features
 OS Component – Memory Management

Also suffers from oversubscription -> requires extra management efficiency from
VMM
For example, VMware ESX guests have a configured amount of physical memory,
then ESX uses 3 methods of memory management
1. Double-paging, in which the guest page table indicates a page is in a
physical frame but the VMM moves some of those pages to backing store
2. Install a pseudo-device driver in each guest (it looks like a device driver to
the guest kernel but really just adds kernel-mode code to the guest)
 Balloon memory manager communicates with VMM and is told to
allocate or deallocate memory to decrease or increase physical
memory use of guest, causing guest OS to free or have more memory
available
3. Deduplication by VMM determining if same page loaded more than once,
memory mapping the same page into multiple guests
OS Component – I/O
Easier for VMMs to integrate with guests because I/O has lots of
variation
Already somewhat segregated / flexible via device drivers
VMM can provide new devices and device drivers
But overall I/O is complicated for VMMs
Many short paths for I/O in standard OSes for improved performance
Less hypervisor needs to do for I/O for guests, the better
Possibilities include direct device access, DMA pass-through, direct interrupt
delivery
Again, HW support needed for these
Networking also complex as VMM and guests all need network
access
VMM can bridge guest to network (allowing direct access)
And / or provide network address translation (NAT)
NAT address local to machine on which guest is running, VMM provides address
translation to guest to hide its address
 OS Component – Storage Management
• Both boot disk and general data access need be provided by VMM
• Need to support potentially dozens of guests per VMM (so standard
disk partitioning not sufficient)
• Type 1 – storage guest root disks and config information within file
system provided by VMM as a disk image
• Type 2 – store as files in file system provided by host OS
• Duplicate file -> create new guest
• Move file to another system -> move guest
• Physical-to-virtual (P-to-V) convert native disk blocks into VMM
format
• Virtual-to-physical (V-to-P) convert from virtual format to native or
disk format
• VMM also needs to provide access to network attached storage
(just networking) and other disk images, disk partitions, disks, etc
OS Component – Live Migration
• Taking advantage of VMM features leads to new functionality not found on general
operating systems such as live migration
• Running guest can be moved between systems, without interrupting user access to the
guest or its apps
• Very useful for resource management, maintenance downtime windows, etc
1.The source VMM establishes a connection with the target VMM
2.The target creates a new guest by creating a new VCPU, etc
3.The source sends all read-only guest memory pages to the target
4.The source sends all read-write pages to the target, marking them as clean
5.The source repeats step 4, as during that step some pages were probably modified
by the guest and are now dirty
6.When cycle of steps 4 and 5 becomes very short, source VMM freezes guest, sends
VCPU’s final state, sends other state details, sends final dirty pages, and tells target
to start running the guest
• Once target acknowledges that guest running, source terminates guest
Live Migration of Guest Between Servers
Examples - VMware

VMware Workstation runs on x86, provides VMM for guests

Runs as application on other native, installed host operating
system -> Type 2
Lots of guests possible, including Windows, Linux, etc all
runnable concurrently (as resources allow)
Virtualization layer abstracts underlying HW, providing guest
with is own virtual CPUs, memory, disk drives, network
interfaces, etc
Physical disks can be provided to guests, or virtual physical
disks (just files within host file system)
VMware Workstation Architecture
Examples – Java Virtual Machine
Example of programming-environment virtualization
Very popular language / application environment invented by
Sun Microsystems in 1995
Write once, run anywhere
Includes language specification (Java), API library, Java virtual
machine (JVM)
Java objects specified by class construct, Java program is one or
more objects
Each Java object compiled into architecture-neutral bytecode
output (.class) which JVM class loader loads
JVM compiled per architecture, reads bytecode and executes
Includes garbage collection to reclaim memory no longer in use
Made faster by just-in-time (JIT) compiler that turns bytecodes
into native code and caches them
The Java Virtual Machine
End of Chapter 16