Xen and the art of virtualization

Numerous systems have been designed which use virtualization to subdivide the ample resources of a modern computer. Some require specialized hardware, or cannot support commodity operating systems. Some target 100% binary compatibility at the expense of performance. Others sacrifice security or functionality for speed. Few offer resource isolation or performance guarantees; most provide only best-effort provisioning, risking denial of service. This paper presents Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality. This is achieved by providing an idealized virtual machine abstraction to which operating systems such as Linux, BSD and Windows XP, can be ported with minimal effort. Our design is targeted at hosting up to 100 virtual machine instances simultaneously on a modern server. The virtualization approach taken by X...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Timothy L. Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield
• Keywords: Commodity Operating Systems, Idealized Virtual Machine, Operating System, SOSP 2003, Virtual Machine