Mobycast Podcast

82. Virtual Machines vs. Containers Revisited – Part 2

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Summary

Cloud computing would not be possible if not for virtual machines. They are the fundamental resource for cloud-native applications. Then along came Docker with its containers, and the virtualization scene got a bit more complicated and confusing.

So, we kicked off a new series where we go deep on virtual machines and containers, aiming to clear up any confusion between these important technologies.

In episode #81 of Mobycast, we discussed full virtualization, also known as virtual machines. We explained hypervisors, the fundamental technology that enables virtual machines. And then we took a detailed look at how Type 1 hypervisors work.

In today’s episode of Mobycast, Jon and Chris bring these concepts to life by examining several popular hypervisor implementations.

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In this episode, we cover the following topics:

  • Hypervisor implementations
    • Hyper-V
      • Type 1 hypervisor from Microsoft
      • Architecture
        • Implements isolation of virtual machines in terms of a partition
          • Partition is logical unit of isolation in which each guest OS executes
        • Parent partition
          • Virtualization software runs in parent partition and has direct access to hardware
            • Requires supported version of Windows Server
          • There must be at least one parent partition
          • Parent partition creates child partitions which host the guest OSes
            • Done via Hyper-V “hypercall” API
          • Parent partitions run a Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) which connects to the VMBus
            • Handles device access requests from child partition
        • Child partition
          • Does not have direct access to hardware
            • Has virtual view of processor and runs in Guest Virtual Address (not necessarily the entire virtual address space)
          • Hypervisor handles interrupts to processor, and redirects to respective partition
          • Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partition
        • VMBus
          • Logical channel which enables inter-partition communication
    • KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
      • Virtualization module in Linux kernel
        • Turns Linux kernel into hypervisor
        • Available in mainline Linux since 2007
      • Can run multiple VMs running unmodified Linux or Windows images
      • Leverages hardware virtualization
        • Via CPU virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V)
      • But also provides paravirtualization support for Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/Windows using VirtIO API
      • Architecture
        • Kernel component
          • Consists of:
            • Loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure
            • Processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko
        • Userspace component
          • QEMU (Quick Emulator)
            • Userland program that does hardware emulation
            • Used by KVM for I/O emulations
  • AWS hypervisor choices & history
    • AWS uses custom hardware for faster EC2 VM performance
    • Original EC2 technology ran highly customized version of Xen hypervisor
      • VMs can run using either paravirtualization (PV) or hardware virtual machine (HVM)
      • HVM guests are fully virtualized
        • VMs on top of hypervisor are not aware they are sharing with other VMs
      • Memory allocated to guest OSes is scrubbed by hypervisor when it is de-allocated
      • Only AWS admins have access to hypervisors
    • AWS found that Xen has many limitations that impede their growth
      • Engineers improved performance by moving parts of software stack to purpose-built hardware components
    • C3 instance family (2013)
      • Debut of custom chips in Amazon EC2
        • Custom network interface for faster bandwidth and throughput
    • C4 instance family (2015)
      • Offload network virtualization to custom hardware with ASIC optimized for storage services
    • C5 instance family (2017)
      • Project Nitro
        • Traditional hypervisors do everything
          • Protect the physical hardware and bios, virtualize the CPU, storage, networking, management tasks
        • Nitro breaks apart those functions, offloading to dedicated hardware and software
        • Replace Xen with a highly optimized KVM hypervisor tightly coupled with an ASIC
        • Very fast VMs approaching performance of bare metal server
    • Amazon EC2 – Bare metal instances (2017)
      • Use Project Nitro

Links

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