Hypervisor - UNIX and Linux Servers

UNIX and Linux Servers

Several factors led to a resurgence around 2005 in the use of virtualization technology among UNIX and Linux server vendors:

• expanding hardware capabilities, allowing each single machine to do more simultaneous work
• efforts to control costs and to simplify management through consolidation of servers
• the need to control large multiprocessor and cluster installations, for example in server farms and render farms
• the improved security, reliability, and device independence possible from hypervisor architectures
• the ability to run complex, OS-dependent applications in different hardware or OS environments

Major UNIX vendors, including Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, and SGI, have been selling virtualized hardware since before 2000. These have generally been large systems with hefty, server-class price-tags (in the multi-million dollar range at the high end), although virtualization is also available on some low- and mid-range systems, such as IBM's pSeries servers, Sun's CoolThreads T1000, T2000 and T5x00 servers and HP Superdome series.

Multiple host operating systems have been modified to run as guest OSes on Sun's Logical Domains Hypervisor. As of late 2006, Solaris, Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), and FreeBSD have been ported to run on top of Hypervisor (and can all run simultaneously on the same processor, as fully virtualized independent guest OSes). Wind River "Carrier Grade Linux" also runs on Sun's Hypervisor. Full virtualization on SPARC processors proved straightforward: since its inception in the mid-1980s Sun deliberately kept the SPARC architecture clean of artifacts that would have impeded virtualization. (Compare with virtualization on x86 processors below.)

HP calls its technology to host multiple OS technology on its Itanium powered systems (Integrity) "Integrity Virtual Machines" (Integrity VM). Itanium can run HP-UX, Linux, Windows and OpenVMS. Except for OpenVMS, to be supported in a later release, these environments are also supported as virtual servers on HP's Integrity VM platform. The HP-UX operating system hosts the Integrity VM hypervisor layer that allows for many important features of HP-UX to be taken advantage of and provides major differentiation between this platform and other commodity platforms - such as processor hotswap, memory hotswap, and dynamic kernel updates without system reboot. While it heavily leverages HP-UX, the Integrity VM hypervisor is really a hybrid that runs on bare-metal while guests are executing. Running normal HP-UX applications on an Integrity VM host is heavily discouraged, because Integrity VM implements its own memory management, scheduling and I/O policies that are tuned for virtual machines and are not as effective for normal applications. HP also provides more rigid partitioning of their Integrity and HP9000 systems by way of VPAR and nPar technology, the former offering shared resource partitioning and the later offering complete I/O and processing isolation. The flexibility of virtual server environment (VSE) has given way to its use more frequently in newer deployments.

IBM provides virtualization partition technology known as logical partitioning (LPAR) on System/390, zSeries, pSeries and iSeries systems. For IBM's Power Systems, the Power Hypervisor (PowerVM) functions as a native (bare-metal) hypervisor in firmware and provides EAL4+ strong isolation between LPARs. Processor capacity is provided to LPARs in either a dedicated fashion or on an entitlement basis where unused capacity is harvested and can be re-allocated to busy workloads. Groups of LPARs can have their processor capacity managed as if they were in a "pool" - IBM refers to this capability as Multiple Shared-Processor Pools (MSPPs) and implements it in servers with the POWER6 processor. LPAR and MSPP capacity allocations can be dynamically changed. Memory is allocated to each LPAR (at LPAR initiation or dynamically) and is address-controlled by the POWER Hypervisor. For real-mode addressing by operating systems (AIX, Linux, IBM i), the POWER processors (POWER4 onwards) have designed virtualization capabilities where a hardware address-offset is evaluated with the OS address-offset to arrive at the physical memory address. Input/Output (I/O) adapters can be exclusively "owned" by LPARs or shared by LPARs through an appliance partition known as the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS). The Power Hypervisor provides for high levels of reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) by facilitating hot add/replace of many parts (model dependent: processors, memory, I/O adapters, blowers, power units, disks, system controllers, etc.) It is interesting to note that because this PowerVM hypervisor is integral and part of every single POWER system IBM has made since the POWER4 systems, that every benchmark ever run on those systems is technically virtualized and as the benchmark results indicate this virtualization works extremely well. Furthermore it is extremely secure and in fact to date there has never been a single reported security flaw reported in the PowerVM hypervisor itself.

Similar trends have occurred with x86/x86_64 server platforms, where open-source projects such as Xen have led virtualization efforts. These include hypervisors built on Linux and Solaris kernels as well as custom kernels. Since these technologies span from large systems down to desktops, they are described in the next section.