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Xen and the art of virtualization
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Source ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles archive
Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles table of contents
Bolton Landing, NY, USA
SESSION: Virtual machine monitors table of contents
Pages: 164 - 177  
Year of Publication: 2003
ISBN:1-58113-757-5
Also published in ...
Authors
Paul Barham  Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
Boris Dragovic  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Keir Fraser  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Steven Hand  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Tim Harris  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Alex Ho  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Rolf Neugebauer  Intel Research, Cambridge, UK
Ian Pratt  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Andrew Warfield  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Sponsors
SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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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.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
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CITED BY  388

Collaborative Colleagues:
Paul Barham: colleagues
Boris Dragovic: colleagues
Keir Fraser: colleagues
Steven Hand: colleagues
Tim Harris: colleagues
Alex Ho: colleagues
Rolf Neugebauer: colleagues
Ian Pratt: colleagues
Andrew Warfield: colleagues