virtualization - memory and device I/O virtualization

Memory Virtualization

Virtual machine memory virtualization is very similar to the virtual memory support provided by modern operating systems. Applications see a contiguous address space that is not necessarily tied to the underlying physical memory in the system. The operating system keeps mappings of virtual page numbers to physical page numbers stored in page tables. All modern x86 CPUs include a memory management unit (MMU) and a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) to optimize virtual memory performance.

The VMM is responsible for mapping guest physical memory to the actual machine memory, and it uses shadow page tables to accelerate the mappings. As depicted by the red line in Figure 8, the VMM uses TLB hardware to map the virtual memory directly to the machine memory to avoid the two levels of translation on every access. When the guest OS changes the virtual memory to physical memory mapping, the VMM updates the shadow page tables to enable a direct lookup. MMU virtualization creates some overhead for all virtualization approaches, but this is the area where second generation hardware assisted virtualization will offer efficiency gains.

 

Device and I/O Virtualization

This involves managing the routing of I/O requests between virtual devices and the shared physical hardware.

 

Software based I/O virtualization and management, in contrast to a direct pass-through to the hardware, enables a rich set of features and simplified management. With networking for example, virtual NICs and switches create virtual networks between virtual machines without the network traffic consuming bandwidth on the physical network, NIC teaming allows multiple physical NICS to appear as one and failover transparently for virtual machines, and virtual machines can be seamlessly relocated to different systems using VMotion while keeping their existing MAC addresses. The key to effective I/O virtualization is to preserve these virtualization benefits while keeping the added CPU utilization to a minimum.

The hypervisor virtualizes the physical hardware and presents each virtual machine with astandardized set of virtual devices as seen in Figure 9.