Hosting Multiple Operating Systems Using Hypervisors

Hosting Multiple Operating Systems Using Hypervisors

Two other approaches that enforce better isolation between guests’ operating systems also remove the restriction that the guests run the same operating system as the host. These approaches are known as type 1 and type 2 hypervisors.

Type 1 hypervisors replace the host operating system with a very lightweight but high-level system supervisor system, or hypervisor, that can load and initiate multiple operating system instances on its own. Each operating system instance is entirely isolated from the others while sharing the same hardware.

Each operating system appears to have access to its own machine. It is not apparent, from within the operating system, that the hardware is being shared. The hardware has effectively been virtualized, in that the guest operating system will believe it is running on whatever type of hardware the hypervisor indicates.

This provides the isolation that is needed for ensuring both security and robustness, while at the same time making it possible to run multiple copies of different operating systems as guests on the same host. Each guest believes that the entire hardware resources of the machine are available. Examples of this kind of hypervisor are the Logical Domains provided on the Sun UltraSPARC T1 and T2 product lines or the Xen hyper-visor software on x86. Figure 3.5 illustrates a type 1 hypervisor.

A type 2 hypervisor is actually a normal user application running on top of a host operating system. The hypervisor software is architected to host other operating systems. Good examples of type 2 hypervisors are the open source VirtualBox software, VMware, or the Parallels software for the Apple Macintosh. Figure 3.6 illustrates a type 2 hypervisor.

Clearly, it is also possible to combine these strategies and have a system that supports multiple levels of virtualization, although this might not be good for overall performance.

Even though these strategies are complex, it is worth exploring why virtualization is an appealing technology.

ⁿ    Security. In a virtualized or containerized environment, it is very hard for an application in one virtualized operating system to obtain access to data held in a

different one. This also applies to operating systems being hacked; the damage that a hacker can do is constrained by what is visible to them from the operating sys-tem that they hacked into.

Robustness. With virtualization, a fault in a guest operating system can affect only those applications running on that operating system, not other applications running in other guest operating systems.

ⁿ    Configuration isolation. Some applications expect to be configured in particular ways: They might always expect to be installed in the same place or find their con-figuration parameters in the same place. With virtualization, each instance believes it has the entire system to itself, so it can be installed in one place and not interfere with another instance running on the same host system in a different virtualized container.

ⁿ   Restricted control. A user or application can be given root access to an instance of a virtualized operating system, but this does not give them absolute control over the entire system.

ⁿ   Replication. There are situations, such as running a computer lab, where it is nec-essary to be able to quickly reproduce multiple instances of an identical configura-tion. Virtualization can save the effort of performing clean reinstalls of an operating system. A new guest operating system can be started, providing a new instance of the operating system. This new instance can even use a preconfigured image, so it can be up and running easily.

ⁿ   Experimentation. It is very easy to distribute a virtualized image of an operating system. This means a user can try a new operating system without doing any dam-age to their existing configuration.

ⁿ   Hardware isolation. In some cases, it is possible to take the running image of a virtualized operating system and move that to a new machine. This means that old or broken hardware can be switched out without having to make changes to the software running on it.

Scaling. It is possible to dynamically respond to increased requests for work by starting up more virtual images. For example, a company might provide a web-hosted computation on-demand service. Demand for the service might peak on weekday evenings but be very low the rest of the time. Using virtualization, it would be possible to start up new virtual machines to handle the load at the times when the demand increases.

ⁿ   Consolidation. One of the biggest plays for virtualization is that of consolidating multiple old machines down to fewer new machines. Virtualization can take the existing applications, and their host operating systems can move them to a new host. Since the application is moved with its host operating system, the transition is more likely to be smooth than if the application had to be reconfigured for a new environment.

All these characteristics of virtualization make it a good fit for cloud computing. Cloud computing is a service provided by a remote farm of machines. Using virtualization, each user can be presented with root access to an unshared virtual machine. The number of machines can be scaled to match the demand for their service, and new machines can quickly be brought into service by replicating an existing setup. Finally, the software is isolated from the physical hardware that it is running on, so it can easily be moved to new hardware as the farm evolves.