Virtual machine

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Classification of virtual machines can be based on the degree to which they implement functionality of targeted real machines. That way, system virtual machines (also known as full virtualization VMs) provide a complete substitute for the targeted real machine and a level of functionality required for the execution of a complete operating system. On the other hand, process virtual machines are designed to execute a single computer program by providing an abstracted and platform-independent program execution environment.

Different virtualization techniques are used, based on the desired usage. Native execution is based on direct virtualization of the underlying raw hardware, thus it provides multiple "instances" of the same architecture a real machine is based on, capable of running complete operating systems. Some virtual machines can also emulate different architectures and allow execution of software applications and operating systems written for another CPU or architecture. Operating system–level virtualization allows resources of a computer to be partitioned via kernel's support for multiple isolated user space instances, which are usually called containers and may look and feel like real machines from the end users' point of view.

Some computer architectures are capable of hardware-assisted virtualization, which enables efficient full virtualization by using virtualization-specific hardware capabilities, primarily from the host CPUs.


A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (for example, a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. Virtual machines are separated into two major classes, based on their use and degree of correspondence to any real machine:

  • A system virtual machine provides a complete system platform which supports the execution of a complete operating system (OS).[1] These usually emulate an existing architecture, and are built with the purpose of either providing a platform to run programs where the real hardware is not available for use (for example, executing on otherwise obsolete platforms), or of having multiple instances of virtual machines leading to more efficient use of computing resources, both in terms of energy consumption and cost effectiveness (known as hardware virtualization, the key to a cloud computing environment), or both.
  • A process virtual machine (also, language virtual machine) is designed to run a single program, which means that it supports a single process. Such virtual machines are usually closely suited to one or more programming languages and built with the purpose of providing program portability and flexibility (amongst other things). An essential characteristic of a virtual machine is that the software running inside is limited to the resources and abstractions provided by the virtual machine—it cannot break out of its virtual environment.


System virtual machines[edit]

System virtual machine advantages:

  • Multiple OS environments can co-exist on the same primary hard drive, with a virtual partition that allows sharing of files generated in either the "host" operating system or "guest" virtual environment. Adjunct software installations, wireless connectivity, and remote replication, such as printing and faxing, can be generated in any of the guest or host operating systems. Regardless of the system, all files are stored on the hard drive of the host OS.
  • Application provisioning, maintenance, high availability and disaster recovery are inherent in the virtual machine software selected.
  • Can provide emulated hardware environments different from the host's instruction set architecture (ISA), through emulation or by using just-in-time compilation.

The main disadvantages of VMs are:

  • A virtual machine is less efficient than an actual machine when it accesses the host hard drive indirectly.
  • When multiple VMs are concurrently running on the hard drive of the actual host, adjunct virtual machines may exhibit a varying and/or unstable performance (speed of execution and malware protection). This depends on the data load imposed on the system by other VMs, unless the selected VM software provides temporal isolation among virtual machines.
  • Malware protection for VM's are not necessarily compatible with the "host", and may require separate software.

Multiple VMs running their own guest operating system are frequently engaged for server consolidation in order to avoid interference from separate VMs on the same actual machine platform.

The desire to run multiple operating systems was the initial motivation for virtual machines, so as to allow time-sharing among several single-tasking operating systems. In some respects, a system virtual machine can be considered a generalization of the concept of virtual memory that historically preceded it. IBM's CP/CMS, the first systems to allow full virtualization, implemented time sharing by providing each user with a single-user operating system, the CMS. Unlike virtual memory, a system virtual machine entitled the user to write privileged instructions in their code. This approach had certain advantages, such as adding input/output devices not allowed by the standard system.[3]

As technology evolves virtual memory for purposes of virtualization, new systems of memory overcommitment may be applied to manage memory sharing among multiple virtual machines on one actual computer operating system. It may be possible to share "memory pages" that have identical contents among multiple VM's that run on the same actual machine. This may result in mapping them to the same physical page, by a technique known as Kernel SamePage Merging. This is particularly useful for read-only pages, such as those that contain code segments. In particular would be the case of multiple virtual machines running the same or similar software, software libraries, web servers, middleware components, etc. The guest operating systems do not need to be compliant with the host hardware, thereby making it possible to run different operating systems on the same computer (e.g., Microsoft Windows, Linux, or previous versions of an operating system to support future software.

The use of virtual machines to support separate guest operating systems is popular in regard to embedded systems. A typical use would be to support an actual-time operating system simultaneously with a preferred complex operating system, such as Linux or Windows. Another use would be for novel and unproven software still in the developmental stage, such as sandbox. Virtual machines have other advantages for operating system development, and may include improved debugging access and faster reboots.[4]

Process virtual machines[edit]

A process VM, sometimes called an application virtual machine, or Managed Runtime Environment (MRE), runs as a normal application inside a host OS and supports a single process. It is created when that process is started and destroyed when it exits. Its purpose is to provide a platform-independent programming environment that abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system, and allows a program to execute in the same way on any platform.

A process VM provides a high-level abstraction – that of a high-level programming language (compared to the low-level ISA abstraction of the system VM). Process VMs are implemented using an interpreter; performance comparable to compiled programming languages is achieved by the use of just-in-time compilation.

This type of VM has become popular with the Java programming language, which is implemented using the Java virtual machine. Other examples include the Parrot virtual machine, and the .NET Framework, which runs on a VM called the Common Language Runtime. All of them can serve as an abstraction layer for any computer language.

A special case of process VMs are systems that abstract over the communication mechanisms of a (potentially heterogeneous) computer cluster. Such a VM does not consist of a single process, but one process per physical machine in the cluster. They are designed to ease the task of programming concurrent applications by letting the programmer focus on algorithms rather than the communication mechanisms provided by the interconnect and the OS. They do not hide the fact that communication takes place, and as such do not attempt to present the cluster as a single machine.[citation needed]

Unlike other process VMs, these systems do not provide a specific programming language, but are embedded in an existing language; typically such a system provides bindings for several languages (e.g., C and FORTRAN).[citation needed] Examples are PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (Message Passing Interface). They are not strictly virtual machines, as the applications running on top still have access to all OS services, and are therefore not confined to the system model.


Virtualization of the underlying raw hardware (native execution)[edit]

This approach is described as full virtualization of the hardware, and can be implemented using a Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor. (A Type 1 hypervisor runs directly on the hardware; a Type 2 hypervisor runs on another operating system, such as Linux). Each virtual machine can run any operating system supported by the underlying hardware. Users can thus run two or more different "guest" operating systems simultaneously, in separate "private" virtual computers.

The pioneer system using this concept was IBM's CP-40, the first (1967) version of IBM's CP/CMS (1967–1972) and the precursor to IBM's VM family (1972–present). With the VM architecture, most users run a relatively simple interactive computing single-user operating system, CMS, as a "guest" on top of the VM control program (VM-CP). This approach kept the CMS design simple, as if it were running alone; the control program quietly provides multitasking and resource management services "behind the scenes". In addition to CMS communication and other system tasks are performed by multitasking VMs (RSCS, GCS, TCP/IP, UNIX), and users can run any of the other IBM operating systems, such as MVS, even a new CP itself or now z/OS. Even the simple CMS could be run in a threaded environment (LISTSERV, TRICKLE). z/VM is the current version of VM, and is used to support hundreds or thousands of virtual machines on a given mainframe. Some installations use Linux for zSeries to run Web servers, where Linux runs as the operating system within many virtual machines.

Full virtualization is particularly helpful in operating system development, when experimental new code can be run at the same time as older, more stable, versions, each in a separate virtual machine. The process can even be recursive: IBM debugged new versions of its virtual machine operating system, VM, in a virtual machine running under an older version of VM, and even used this technique to simulate new hardware.[5]

The standard x86 processor architecture as used in the modern PCs does not actually meet the Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements. Notably, there is no execution mode where all sensitive machine instructions always trap, which would allow per-instruction virtualization.

Despite these limitations, several software packages have managed to provide virtualization on the x86 architecture, even though dynamic recompilation of privileged code, as first implemented by VMware, incurs some performance overhead as compared to a VM running on a natively virtualizable architecture such as the IBM System/370 or Motorola MC68020. By now, several other software packages such as Virtual PC, VirtualBox, Parallels Workstation and Virtual Iron manage to implement virtualization on x86 hardware.

Intel and AMD have introduced features to their x86 processors to enable virtualization in hardware.

As well as virtualization of the resources of a single machine, multiple independent nodes in a cluster can be combined and accessed as a single virtual NUMA machine.[6]

Emulation of a non-native system[edit]

Virtual machines can also perform the role of an emulator, allowing software applications and operating systems written for another computer processor architecture to be run.

Some virtual machines emulate hardware that only exists as a detailed specification. For example:

This technique allows diverse computers to run any software written to that specification; only the virtual machine software itself must be written separately for each type of computer on which it runs.

Operating system–level virtualization[edit]

Operating system–level virtualization is a server virtualization technology which virtualizes servers on an operating system (kernel) layer. It can be thought of as partitioning: a single physical server is sliced into multiple small partitions (otherwise called virtual environments (VE), virtual private servers (VPS), guests, zones, etc.); each such partition looks and feels like a real server, from the point of view of its users.

For example, Solaris Zones supports multiple guest OSs running under the same OS (such as Solaris 10). All guest OSs have to use the same kernel level and cannot run as different OS versions. Solaris native Zones also requires that the host OS be a version of Solaris; other OSs from other manufacturers are not supported.[citation needed] However one would need to use Solaris Branded zones to use other OSs as zones.

Another example is System Workload Partitions (WPARs), introduced in the IBM AIX 6.1 operating system. System WPARs are software partitions running under one instance of the global AIX OS environment.

The operating system level architecture has low overhead that helps to maximize efficient use of server resources. The virtualization introduces only a negligible overhead and allows running hundreds of virtual private servers on a single physical server. In contrast, approaches such as full virtualization (like VMware) and paravirtualization (like Xen or UML) cannot achieve such level of density, due to overhead of running multiple kernels. From the other side, operating system-level virtualization does not allow running different operating systems (i.e. different kernels), although different libraries, distributions, etc. are possible.

List of virtualization-enabled hardware[edit]

  • HP vPAR and cell based nPAR
  • GE Project MAC then
  • Honeywell Multics systems
  • Honeywell 200/2000 systems Liberator replacing IBM 14xx systems, Level 62/64/66 GCOS
  • IBM System/360 Model 145 Hardware emulator for Honeywell 200/2000 systems
  • RCA Spectra/70 Series emulated IBM System/360
  • NAS CPUs emulated IBM and Amdahl machines
  • Honeywell Level 6 minicomputers emulated predecessor 316/516/716 minis
  • Sun Microsystems sun4v (UltraSPARC T1 and T2) – utilized by Logical Domains
  • Xerox Sigma 6 CPUs were modified to emulate GE/Honeywell 600/6000 systems

See also[edit]


  1. ^ "Virtual Machines: Virtualization vs. Emulation". Retrieved 2011-03-11. 
  2. ^ Smith, James; Nair, Ravi (2005). "The Architecture of Virtual Machines". Computer (IEEE Computer Society) 38 (5): 32–38. doi:10.1109/MC.2005.173. 
  3. ^ Smith and Nair, pp. 395–396
  5. ^ See History of CP/CMS for IBM's use of virtual machines for operating system development and simulation of new hardware
  6. ^ Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser. vNUMA: A virtual shared-memory multiprocessor. Proceedings of the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, San Diego, CA, USA, June, 2009 [1]

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