Systems support for virtualization

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Recent years have seen a decided effort to deploy hardware virtualization as a technology to help manage the scale and  complexity of modern computer systems.  Virtualization allows a single physical computer to be partitioned and made to appear as a collection of isolated virtual computers, each running an independent operating system and application stack.  AMD and Intel have released CPU extensions to aid virtualization, and all major OS vendors have announced virtualization support in the next releases of their systems.This proposal is for a research program that explores the challenges and opportunities for systems software as virtualization is deployed in large-scale, enterprise environments.  The use of virtualization in facilities such as industrial datacenters and rent-a-server-style hosting providers dramatically changes many aspects of these systems, which must suddenly scale to support more virtual hosts on the same physical resources, and may be administered by considerably less experienced users due to lower entry costs.  Additionally, virtualization presents a narrow layer of interposition at which systems software may be deployed independent of overlying operating systems and applications.As short term goals, I describe three virtualization projects that are already underway with masters students at UBC.  "SecondSite" is a disaster recovery system that maintains a live, remote copy of a running group of servers and allows this copy to take over operation of the system in the face of failure.  Second, my investigation of packet symmetry enforcement aims to impose limits on the ability of servers to transmit certain types of malicious traffic, protecting hosting facilities from inadvertently being the source of denial-of-service-attacks.  Finally, I consider the use of large caches of network-based memory, as a community resource to avoid the use of mechanical disks.