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System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

Uniform View of Hardware

A hypervisor provides a uniform view of underlying hardware. Machines from different vendors with different I/O subsystems appear to be the same machine, which means that virtual machines can run on any available supported computer. Thus, administrators can view hardware as a pool of resources that can run arbitrary services on demand. Because the hypervisor also encapsulates a virtual machine's software state, the hypervisor layer can map and remap virtual machines to available hardware resources at any time and also use live migration to move virtual machines across computers. These capabilities can also be used for load balancing among a collection of machines, dealing with hardware failures, and scaling systems. When a computer fails and must go offline or when a new machine comes online, the hypervisor layer can remap virtual machines accordingly. Virtual machines are also easy to replicate, which allows administrators to bring new services online as needed.

The hypervisor virtualizes the system's hardware. A virtualization API and tools are provided by the libvirt and virt-install utilities. The hypervisor transparently shares and partitions the system's CPUs, memory, and NIC resources among the user domains. The hypervisor performs the low-level work required to provide a virtualized platform for operating systems.

The hypervisor assigns one or more virtual CPUs (VCPUs) to each domain, allocated from dom0. The virsh setvcpus and virsh vcpupin commands can be used to dynamically set and pin VCPUs to processors. Each VCPU contains all the state one would typically associate with a physical CPU, such as registers, flags, and timestamps. A VCPU in xVM is an entity that can be scheduled, like a thread in the SolarisTMsystem. When it is a domain's turn to run on a CPU, xVM loads the physical CPU with the state in the VCPU, and lets it run. The Solaris system treats each VCPU as it would treat a physical CPU. When the hypervisor selects a VCPU to run, it will be running the thread that the Solaris system loaded on the VCPU.