Article

Xen and the art of virtualization

Authors:

Boris Dragovic,

Rolf Neugebauer,

Andrew WarfieldAuthors Info & Claims

SOSP '03: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles

Pages 164 - 177

https://doi.org/10.1145/945445.945462

Published: 19 October 2003 Publication History

Abstract

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 Xen is extremely efficient: we allow operating systems such as Linux and Windows XP to be hosted simultaneously for a negligible performance overhead --- at most a few percent compared with the unvirtualized case. We considerably outperform competing commercial and freely available solutions in a range of microbenchmarks and system-wide tests.

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Xen and the art of virtualization

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cover image ACM Conferences

SOSP '03: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles

October 2003

338 pages

ISBN:1581137575

DOI:10.1145/945445

General Chair:
Michael L. Scott
University of Rochester
,
Program Chair:
Larry Peterson
Princeton University

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 37, Issue 5
SOSP '03
December 2003
329 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/1165389
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

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Published: 19 October 2003

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https://doi.org/10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559079
Leis VDietrich C(2024)Cloud-Native Database Systems and Unikernels: Reimagining OS Abstractions for Modern HardwareProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3659437.365946217:8(2115-2122)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3659437.3659462
Tripathi SMishra D(2024)PCLive: Pipelined Restoration of Application Containers for Reduced Service DowntimeProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698545(284-301)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698038.3698545
Misono MOkelmann PMainas CBhatotia P(2024)uIO: Lightweight and Extensible UnikernelsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3698038.3698518(580-599)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2024
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