Microvisor: A Scalable Hypervisor Architecture for Microservers

Microvisor: A Scalable Hypervisor Architecture for Microservers

Xenia Ragiadakou, Michail Alvanos, Julian Chesterfield, John Thompson and Michail Flouris

Technical Report, March 2016.

Abstract

Virtualization of server hardware is a commonly used practice to provide scalable resource management. In order to meet a variety of emerging technology trends, a novel, super-lightweight Type I Hypervisor architecture is essential. The proposed ‘Microvisor’ architecture is significant for a number of reasons.

1. Resource utilization efficiency. Microservers are servers with limited resources and high performance-to-power ratios, which are built and managed as a cluster of cache-coherent CPU islands.
2. Performance and scalability. To meet the performance and scale demands of emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms, a significantly rearchitected paravirtual network IO path is required.