VIRTUALIZATION: COMPARISION OF WINDOWS AND LINUX

Ms. Pooja Sharma

Lecturer (I.T) PCE, Jaipur

Email:er9.pooja@gmail.com

Charnaksh Jain
IV yr (I.T) PCE, Jaipur

charnaksh@gmail.com

Abstract Full-Virtualization, Para-Virtualization, hyper-

Virtualization as a concept is not new; computational
environment virtualization has been around since the
first mainframe systems. But recently, the term
"virtualization" has become ubiquitous, representing
any type of process obfuscation where a process is
somehow removed from its physical operating
environment. Because of this ambiguity,
virtualization can almost be applied to any and all
parts of an IT infrastructure. For example, mobile
device emulators are a form of virtualization because
the hardware platform normally required to run the
mobile operating system has been emulated,
removing the OS binding from the hardware it was
written for. But this is just one example of one type
of virtualization; there are many definitions of the
term "virtualization" floating around in the current
lexicon, and all (or at least most) of them are correct,
which can be quite confusing. This paper focuses on
virtualization as it pertains to the data center; but
before considering any type of data center
virtualization, it's important to define what
technology or category of service you're trying to
virtualize. Generally speaking, virtualization falls
into three categories: Operating System, Storage, and
Applications. But these categories are very broad and
don't adequately delineate the key aspects of data
center virtualization.
Keywords
visior(Hyper-V), Guest Operating System, Host
Operating System.
1. Introduction
Virtualization provides a set of tools for increasing
flexibility and lowering costs, things that are
important in every enterprise and Information
Technology organization. Virtualization solutions are
becoming increasingly available and rich in features.
Since virtualization can provide significant benefits
to your organization in multiple areas, you should be
establishing pilots, developing expertise and putting
virtualization technology to work now.
In essence, virtualization increases flexibility by
decoupling an operating system and the services and
applications supported by that system from a specific
physical hardware platform. It allows the
establishment of multiple virtual environments on a
shared hardware platform. Organizations looking to
innovate find that the ability to create new systems
and services without installing additional hardware
(and to quickly tear down those systems and services
when they are no longer needed) can be a significant
boost to innovation.
Virtualization can also excel at supporting innovation
through the use of virtual environments for training
and learning. These services are ideal applications for
virtualization technology. A student can start course
work with a known, standard system environment.
Class work can be isolated from the production
network. Learners can establish unique software
environments without demanding exclusive use of
hardware resources.
As the capabilities of virtual environments continue
to grow, we’re likely to see increasing use of
virtualization to enable portable environments
tailored to the needs of a specific user. These
environments can be moved dynamically to an
accessible or local processing environment,
regardless of where the user is located. The user’s
virtual environments can be stored on the network or
carried on a portable memory device. A related
concept is the Appliance Operating System, an
application package oriented operating system
designed to run in a virtual environment. The
package approach can yield lower development and
support costs as well as insuring the application runs
in a known, secure environment. An Appliance
Operating System solution provides benefits to both
application developers and the consumers of those
applications.
Virtualization can also be used to lower costs. One
obvious benefit comes from the consolidation of
servers into a smaller set of more powerful hardware
platforms running a collection of virtual
environments. Not only can costs be reduced by
reducing the amount of hardware and reducing the
amount of unused capacity, but application
performance can actually be improved since the
virtual guests execute on more powerful hardware.
Further benefits include the ability to add hardware
capacity in a non-disruptive manner and to
dynamically migrate workloads to available
resources.
Depending on the needs of your organization, it may
be possible to create a virtual environment for
disaster recovery. Introducing virtualization can
significantly reduce the need to replicate identical
hardware environments and can also enable testing of
disaster scenarios at lower cost. Virtualization
provides an excellent solution for addressing peak or
seasonal workloads.
Cost savings from server consolidation can be
compelling. If you aren’t exploiting virtualization for
this purpose, you should start a program now. As you
gain experience with virtualization, explore the
benefits of workload balancing and virtualized
disaster recovery environments.
Regardless of the specific needs of your enterprise,
you should be investigating virtualization as part of
your system and application portfolio as the
technology is likely to become pervasive. We expect
operating system vendors to include virtualization as
a standard component, hardware vendors to build
virtual capabilities into their platforms, and
virtualization vendors to expand the scope of their
offerings.
2. System Architecture
A functional Red Hat Virtualization system is multi-
layered and is driven by the privileged RedHat
Virtualization component. Red Hat Virtualization can
host multiple guest operating systems.
Each guest operating system runs in its own domain,
Red Hat Virtualization schedules virtual CPUs within
the virtual machines to make the best use of the
available physical CPUs. Each guest operating
systems handles its own applications. These guest
operating systems schedule each application
accordingly.
You can deploy Red Hat Virtualization in one of two
choices: full virtualization or Para-virtualization.
Full virtualization provides total abstraction of the
underlying physical system and creates a new virtual
system in which the guest operating systems can run.
No modifications are needed in the guest OS or
application (the guest OS or application is not aware
of the virtualized environment and runs normally).
Para-virtualization requires user modification of the
guest operating systems that run on the virtual
machines (these guest operating systems are aware
that they are running on a virtual machine) and
provide near-native performance. You can deploy
both Para-virtualization and full virtualization across
your virtualization infrastructure.
The first domain, known as domain0 (dom0), is
automatically created when you boot the system.
Domain0 is the privileged guest and it possesses
management capabilities which can create new
domains and manage their virtual devices. Domain0
handles the physical hardware, such as network cards
and hard disk controllers. Domain0 also handles
administrative tasks such as suspending, resuming, or
migrating guest domains to other virtual machines.
The hypervisor (Red Hat's Virtual Machine Monitor)
is a virtualization platform that allows multiple
operating systems to run on a single host
simultaneously within a full virtualization
environment. A guest is an operating system (OS)
that runs on a virtual machine in addition to the host
or main OS.
With Red Hat Virtualization, each guest memory
comes from a slice of the host's physical memory. For
Para-virtualized guests, you can set both the initial
memory and the maximum size of the virtual
machine. You can add (or remove) physical memory
to the virtual machine at runtime without exceeding
the maximum size you specify. This process is called
ballooning.
You can configure each guest with a number of
virtual cpus (called vcpus). The Virtual Machine
Manager schedules the vcpus according to the
workload on the physical CPUs.
You can grant a guest any number of virtual disks.
The guest sees these as either hard disks or (for full
virtual guests) as CD-ROM drives. Each virtual disk
is served to the guest from a block device or from a
regular file on the host. The device on the host
contains the entire full disk image for the guest, and
usually includes partition tables, multiple partitions,
and potentially LVM physical volumes.
Virtual networking interfaces runs on the guest. Other
interfaces can run on the guest like virtual Ethernet
Internet cards (VNICs). These network interfaces are
configured with a persistent virtual media access
control (MAC) address. The default installation of a
new guest installs the VNIC with a MAC address
selected at random from a reserved pool of over 16
million addresses, so it is unlikely that any two guests
will receive the same MAC address.
Complex sites with a large number of guests can
allocate MAC addresses manually to ensure that they
remain unique on the network.
Each guest has a virtual text console that connects to
the host. You can redirect guest logins and console
output to the text console.
You can configure any guest to use a virtual graphical
console that corresponds to the normal video console
on the physical host. You can do this for full virtual
and Para-virtualized guests. It employs the features of
the standard graphic adapter like boot messaging,
graphical booting, multiple virtual terminals, and can
launch the x window system. You can also use the
graphical keyboard to configure the virtual keyboard
and mouse.
Guests can be identified in any of three identities:
domain name (domain-name), identity (domain-id),
or UUID. The domain-name is a text string that
corresponds to a guest configuration file. The
domain-name is used to launch the guests, and when
the guest runs the same name is used to identify and
control it. The domain-id is a unique, non-persistent
number that gets assigned to an active domain and is
used to identify and control it. The UUID is a
persistent, unique identifier that is controlled from
the guest's configuration file and ensures that the
guest is identified over time by system management
tools. It is visible to the guest when it runs. A new
UUID is automatically assigned to each guest by the
system tools when the guest first installs.
3. Implementation
Intel and AMD have independently developed
virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. They
are not directly compatible with each other, but serve
largely the same functions. Either will allow a virtual
machine hypervisor to run an unmodified guest
operating system without incurring significant
emulation performance penalties.
3.1 Hardware Implementation
3.1.1 AMD virtualization (AMD-V)
AMD's virtualization extensions to the 64-bit X86
architecture is named AMD Virtualization,
abbreviated AMD-V. It is still referred to as
"Pacifica", the AMD internal project code name.
AMD-V is present in AMD Athlon 64 and Athlon 64
X2 with family "F" or "G" on socket AM2 (not 939),
Turion 64 X2, Opteron 2nd generation and 3rd
generation, Phenom, and all newer processors.
Sempron processors do not include support for AMD-
V.
On May 23, 2006, AMD released the Athlon 64
("Orleans"), the Athlon 64 X2 ("Windsor") and the
Athlon 64 FX ("Windsor") as the first AMD
processors to support AMD-V. Prior processors do
not have AMD-V.
AMD has published a specification for a technology
named IO Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) to
AMD-V. This provides a way of configuring interrupt
delivery to individual virtual machines and an IO
memory translation unit for preventing a virtual
machine from using DMA to break isolation. The
IOMMU also plays an important role in advanced
operating systems (absent virtualization) and the
AMD Torrenza architecture.
3.1.2 Intel Virtualization Technology for
x86 (Intel VT-x)
Previously codenamed "Vanderpool", VT-x is Intel's
technology for virtualization on the x-86 platforms.
Intel plans to add Extended Page Tables (EPT), a
technology for page table virtualization, in the
upcoming Nehalem architecture.
The following modern Intel processors include
support for VT-x:
• Pentium 4 - 662 and 672
• Pentium Extreme Edition 955 and 965 (not
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with HT)
• Pentium D 920-960 except 945, 935, 925,
915
• some models of the Core processors family
• some models of the Core 2 processors
family
• Xeon 3000 series
• Xeon 5000 series
• Xeon 7000 series
• some models of the Atom processor family
Neither Intel Celeron nor Pentium Dual-Core nor
Pentium M processors have VT technology.
3.2 Software Implementation
Virtual Server 2005 R2
One way to support multiple virtual machines on a
single physical machine is to run virtualization
software largely on top of the operating system.
Writing this software is challenging, especially for
older processors that don’t provide built-in support
for hardware virtualization. Yet it’s a viable solution,
one that’s proven quite successful in practice. One
example of this success is Virtual Server 2005 R2, a
freely available technology for Windows Server
2003. Figure 5 illustrates how Virtual Server supports
multiple virtual machines on a single physical
machine.
Whatever guest operating systems are running, all of
them require storage. To allow this, Microsoft has
defined a virtual hard disk (VHD) format. A VHD is
really just a file, but to a virtual machine, it appears
to be an attached disk drive. Guest operating systems
and their applications rely on one or more VHDs for
storage. In fact, all of Microsoft’s hardware
virtualization technologies use the same VHD format,
making it easier to move information among them.
Virtual PC 2007
The most commercially important aspect of hardware
virtualization today is the ability to consolidate
workloads from multiple physical servers onto one
machine. Yet it can also be useful to run guest
operating systems on a desktop machine. Virtual PC
is architecturally much like Virtual Server. Virtual
Server is significantly more scalable than Virtual PC,
and it supports a wider array of storage options.
Virtual Server also includes administrative tools that
target professional IT staff, while Virtual PC is
designed to be managed by users. While Virtual PC
does provide a few things that are lacking in Virtual
Server, such as sound card support, it’s fair to think
of it as offering a simpler approach to hardware
virtualization for desktop users.
Xen Virtualization
A functional Red Hat Virtualization system is multi-
layered and is driven by the privileged Red Hat
Virtualization component. Red Hat Virtualization can
host multiple guest operating systems. Each guest
operating system runs in its own domain, Red Hat
Virtualization schedules virtual CPUs within the
virtual machines to make the best use of the available
physical CPUs. Each guest operating systems handles
its own applications. These guest operating systems
schedule each application accordingly.
4. EVALUATION
Overhead
Virtualization usually imposes little or no overhead,
because programs in virtual partition use the
operating system's normal system call interface and
do not need to be subject to emulation or run in an
intermediate virtual machine, as is the case with
whole-system virtualizers (such as VMware and
QEMU) or para-virtualizers (such as Xen and UML).
It also does not require hardware assistance to
perform efficiently.
Flexibility
Operating system-level virtualization is not as
flexible as other virtualization approaches since it
cannot host a guest operating system different from
the host one, or a different guest kernel. For example,
with Linux, different distributions are fine, but other
OS such as Windows cannot be hosted. This
limitation is partially overcome in Solaris Containers
by its branded zones feature, which provides the
ability to run an environment within a container that
emulates a Linux 2.4-based release or an older
Solaris release.
Storage
Some operating-system virtualizers provide file-level
copy-on-write mechanisms. (Most commonly, a
standard file system is shared between partitions, and
partitions which change the files automatically create
their own copies.) This is easier to back up, more
space-efficient and simpler to cache than the block-
level copy-on-write schemes common on whole-
system virtualizers. Whole-system virtualizers,
however, can work with non-native file systems and
create and roll back snapshots of the entire system
state.
Restrictions inside the container
The following actions are often prohibited:
• Modifying the running kernel by direct
access and loading kernel modules.
• Mounting and dismounting file systems.
• Creating device nodes.
• Accessing raw, divert, or routing sockets.
• Modifying kernel runtime parameters, such
as most sysctl settings.
• Changing secure level-related file flags.
• Accessing network resources not associated
with the container.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
Virtualization technologies have matured to the point
where the technology is being deployed across a wide
range of platforms and environments. The usage of
virtualization has gone beyond increasing the
utilization of infrastructure, to areas like data
replication and data protection. This white paper responsiveness and creativity that could only be
looks at the continuing evolution of virtualization, its dreamed of a few years ago. The deftness with which
potential, some tips on optimizing virtualization as applications can be migrated, upsized, downsized,
well as how to future proof the technology. cloned, etc. is something that will forever change the
way IT does its job.
After all, server virtualization's value is well-
established. Many, many companies have migrated 6. References
significant percentages of their servers to virtual
machines hosted on larger servers, gaining benefits in 1. www.google.com
hardware utilization, energy use, and data centre
space. And those companies that haven't done so thus 2. www.wikipedia.com
far are hatching plans to consolidate their servers in
the future. These are all capital or infrastructure costs, 3. www.cio.com
though. What does server virtualization do for human
costs—the IT operations piece of the puzzle? 4. www.terena.org

Base level server consolidation offers a few benefits 5. Redhat Documentation

for IT operations. It makes hardware maintenance
much easier, since virtual machines can be moved to 6. Microsoft Virtualization overview by
other physical servers when it's time to maintain or Davis Chappell
repair the original server. This moves hardware
maintenance from a weekend and late night effort to
a part of the regular business day—certainly a great
convenience.

The next step for most companies is to leverage the

portability of virtual machines to achieve IT
operational agility. Because virtual machines are
captured in disk images, they are portable, no longer
bound to an individual physical server. The ease of
reproducing virtual images means that application
capacity can be easily dialed up and down with the
creation or tear down of additional virtual images.
Server pooling allows virtual machines to be
automatically migrated according to application load.
More sophisticated virtualization uses include high
availability, where virtual machines can be moved—
automatically, by the virtualization management
software itself & mdash: when hardware failures
occur. Seeing the magic of a virtual machine
automatically being brought up on a new server after
its original host is brought down, all without any
human intervention vividly demonstrates the power
of more sophisticated virtualization use.

Certainly these kinds of uses of virtualization

demonstrate its power to transform IT operations,
enabling IT organizations to offer the kind of