Xen and the Art of Virtualization Revisited
Thursday, July 10th, 2008A Talk given by Ian Pratt in Usenix 2008 on goals and challenges of virtualization and how they are handled in Xen. Couple of interesting snippets from the talk:-
- Live relocation - Mechanism for moving a virtual machine from one physical server to another. It performs iterative memory transfer between machines using an intermediate dirty log file for each iteration. The changes in the log file are transferred in next iteration. This would gradually reduce the size of the dirty log file to a point where it is small enough to make the switch over with negligible downtime.
- Virtualization of mobiles - To provide isolation between different types of applications running on mobile phones. For example we can have 3 VMs on a mobile phone one each for running - core radio services, vendor shipped content and user downloaded content.
Ian Pratt, a senior lecturer in University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory stresses the importance of making the university projects open source and pursuing them beyond an academic paper. He acknowledges the challenges faced in taking Xen from a research project to a production quality software as a humbling experience.
