Research On Kernel-based Virtual Machine

Research on Kernel-based Virtual MachineNowadays, researches on cloud computing and virtualization are very hot. The rapiddevelopment and widespread use of virtualization software, plus the Linux operatingsystem getting more and more popular and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)technology has become more sophisticate. And until now researches on virtualizationtechnology and virtual machine in our country are still relatively short. All of these makingresearches about virtualization technology and virtual machine are more important andurgent.Researches on virtualization have been doing for several decades. At the beginning,virtualization technology is mainly applied to server machines, but with the personalcomputer performance enhancement, there are more and more virtualization software areused for personal computers.With the development of virtualization technology and hardware support virtualizationtechnology in last few years, some defects of software virtualization technology have beenimproved, such as increased the performance of virtual machine, greatly reduced thedifficulty of virtualization software development and accelerated the development ofvirtualization software. Although virtualization technology has been developed for a longtime, and it has enhanced the performance of virtual machine, there are still someperformance loss between virtual machines and physical machines. So the virtual machinetesting is very important. Through the tested results of virtual machines' performance, wecan compare the advantages of different virtualization products. And finally provide someuseful information when choose virtualization software.There are many excellent virtualization software, such as VMware Workstation andVMware vShpere which are belonged to VMware Company, KVM from RedHat, Xendevelopped by Cambridge University and Oracle's support VirtualBox, etc. Among somany virtualization products, although KVM came out late, it has become one of the most popular virtualization software by its advantages, such as open source, hardware supportvirtualization, integrated into Linux kernel, simple implementation and high performance,etc. This paper focused on studying KVM. It introduced the implementation mechanism ofKVM, gave a simple tutorial about using KVM and run some performance tests on it. Sothis paper will provide a little help to those people who are learning and using or to thosewho are going to learn and use virtual machines.This paper first introduced virtualization and several virtualization software, thenanalyzed part of the KVM core-code which is integrated in the Linux kernel source-code.After that described how to install and use KVM. Finally tested and compared theperformance of several virtual machines which are created by virtualization software.Compared and analyzed their performances about network throughput, I/O speed and CPUprocessing differences. In addition, this paper also tested the whole virtual machine systemperformance.