ID:

The capabilities of virtualization have rapidly changed how people view their server room. Rather than counting the number of computers, many administrators now count the compute cycles and memory available and depend upon live migration of virtual machines to realize this perspective. One commonly desired usage model is for administrators to simply add more megahertz to the compute pool months or years after the original computers were purchased, when identical machines may no longer be available. In this session, we describe the challenges to migration imposed by progress in processor feature sets, and simple steps to make CPUs, hypervisors, user programs, and guest operating systems work together in a system using migration. In addition to migration, we will also discuss new hardware virtualization features, including nested paging, and their impact on the data center.