Supported Virtualization Modes

There are two basic types of virtualization, full virtualization and paravirtualization. The hypervisor supports both modes.

Full virtualization allows any x86 operating system, including Solaris, Linux, or Windows systems, to run in a guest domain.

Paravirtualization requires changes to the operating system, with the minimum requirement being modifications to support the virtual device interfaces.

A system can have both paravirtualized and fully virtualized domains running simultaneously.

For paravirtualized mode and for all types of operating systems, the only requirement is that the operating system be modified to support the virtual device interfaces.

Overview of Paravirtualization

In the more lightweight paravirtualization, the operating system is both aware of the virtualization layer and modified to support it, which results in higher performance.

The paravirtualized guest domain operating system is ported to run on top of the hypervisor, and uses virtual network, disk, and console devices.

Since the control domain must work closely with the hypervisor layer, control domain is always paravirtualized. Guest domains can be either paravirtualized or fully virtualized.

Devices and Drivers

Because full paravirtualization requires changes to the OS, only specific operating systems can be hosted in a fully paravirtualized guest domain. Currently, those are limited to Solaris, Linux FreeBSD, and NetBSD, although others might be made available in the future.

Partial paravirtualization describes a mechanism in which an otherwise unmodified OS is augmented with paravirtualized drivers for I/O devices. This can significantly improve the performance of the otherwise unmodified guest domain.

Paravirtualized drivers for I/O devices are implemented as a pair of drivers, one in each of the guest and host domains. This mechanism is often termed split drivers.

A frontend driver runs in the guest domain and communicates with a backend driver running in domain 0. This enables the guest domain to access services available to domain 0.

xVM software in the OpenSolaris release currently supports two main split drivers, one for network I/O and one for disk I/O.

Within the guest domain, the frontend driver appears as a normal device. For network, this is an Ethernet device. For disk, this is a traditional block device.

Within domain 0, the behavior of the backend driver depends on the type of device and the configuration of the domain. Network backend drivers typically extend the physical network connectivity available to domain 0 into the guest domain by using a virtual NIC feature. Disk backend drivers can make disk space available to guest domains by using files, ZFS volumes, and physical devices. Various file formats are supported when files are used to provide storage, for example, VMDK. (For more information on VMDK, see the section Using vdiskadm to Create Virtual Disks .)

The Solaris frontend drivers share the same source code whether they are used in paravirtualized (PV) or partially paravirtualized (HVM+PV) domains. There are #ifdefs in the driver source code to accommodate differences between HVM+PV and PV environments, but otherwise they are the same.

The Windows frontend drivers have different source code than those for Solaris, but the protocol between them and the Solaris backend drivers is the same as that used by the Solaris frontend drivers. This protocol was developed by the Xen open source community and is defined by the source code for the Linux variants of the drivers.

The source code for the Solaris drivers is found in /usr/src/uts/common/xen/io. The network frontend driver is xnf, and the disk frontend driver is xdf. The backend drivers have various names, such as xnb, xnbo, xnbu, xdb, and xpvtap.

In addition to these drivers, the Solaris console is virtualized when the Solaris system is running as a guest domain. The console driver interacts with the xenconsoled(1M) daemon running in domain 0 to provide console access.

Overview of Full Virtualization

In a full virtualization, the operating system is not aware that it is running in a virtualized environment under xVM. A fully virtualized guest domain is referred to as a hardware-assisted virtual machine (HVM). An HVM guest domain runs an unmodified operating system.

Fully-virtualized guest domains are supported under xVM with virtualization extensions available on Intel-VT or AMD Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) processors. These extensions must be present and enabled. Some BIOS versions disable the extensions by default. Note that this that hardware is also needed in HVM+PVIO configurations such as Solaris 10 5/09 (Solaris 10 U7) guest domains.

Full virtualization requires that the hypervisor transparently intercept many operations that an operating system typically performs directly on the hardware. This interception allows the hypervisor to ensure that a domain cannot read or modify another domain's memory, cannot interfere with its device access, and cannot shut down the CPUs it is using.