Subject: Cloud Computing and Services Academic Year: 2019-20
Hypervisor
Hypervisor is a form of virtualization software used in Cloud hosting to divide and allocate the
resources on various pieces of hardware. The program which provide partitioning, isolation or
abstraction is called virtualization hypervisor. Hypervisor is a hardware virtualization technique
that allows multiple guest operating systems (OS) to run on a single host system at the same time.
A hypervisor is sometimes also called a virtual machine manager (VMM).
Classified by VMM’s role on host machines
Fig: Types of Hypervisor
TYPE-1 Hypervisor:
Hypervisor runs directly on underlying host system. It is also known as “Native Hypervisor” or
“Bare metal hypervisor”. It does not require any base server operating system. It has direct access
to hardware resources. Examples of Type 1 hypervisors include VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer
and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
TYPE-2 Hypervisor:
A Host operating system runs on underlying host system. It is also known as ‘Hosted Hypervisor”.
Basically, it is a software installed on an operating system. Hypervisor asks operating system to
make hardware calls. Example of Type 2 hypervisor include VMware Player or Parallels Desktop.
Hosted hypervisors are often found on endpoints like PCs.
Emulation technique
Simulate an independent environment where guest ISA and host ISA are different.
Example: Emulate x86 architecture on ARM platform.
Virtualization technique
Department of Information Technology
Subject: Cloud Computing and Services Academic Year: 2019-20
Simulate an independent environment where guest ISA and host ISA are the same.
Example: Virtualize x86 architecture to multiple instances.
Need for virtualization:
Server virtualization enables different OS to share the same network & make it easy
to move OS between different networks without affecting the applications running
on them. This allows portability of application.
Virtualization allows many instance of application to be created thus allowing them
to scale up & down as per requirement. Virtualization enables load balancing thus
allowing companies to handle peak loads.
Storage virtualization enables efficient utilization of existing resources. Allows
services to be provided over internet.
Virtualization Approaches:
Classified by virtualization methods
1. Full-Virtualization
VMM simulates enough hardware to allow an unmodified guest OS.
Ex: KVM with QEMU
Pros: Need not to modify guest OS
Department of Information Technology
Subject: Cloud Computing and Services Academic Year: 2019-20
Cons: Significant performance hit
Fig: Full Virtualization
Fig: Para Virtualization
Department of Information Technology
Subject: Cloud Computing and Services Academic Year: 2019-20
2. Para-Virtualization
Guest OS needs to modified to use special APIs provided by VMM
Ex: KVM with virtio
Pros: Light weight and high performance
Cons: Require modification of guest OS
Department of Information Technology
Subject: Cloud Computing and Services Academic Year: 2019-20
Fig: Virtualization Techniques
Department of Information Technology
