Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right?

At the last HotOS, Mendel Rosenblum gave an `outrageous' opinion that the academic obsession with microkernels during the past two decades produced many publications but little impact. He argued that virtual machine monitors (VMMs) had had considerably more practical uptake, despiteor perhaps due tobeing principally developed by industry.

In this paper, we investigate this claim in light of our experiences in developing the Xen [1] virtual machine monitor. We argue that modern VMMs present a practical platform which allows the development and deployment of innovative systems research: in essence, VMMs are microkernels done right.

Parallax: Managing Storage for a Million Machines

OS virtualization is drastically changing the face of system administration for large computer installations such as commercial datacenters and scientific clusters. A recent report by Gartner predicts that commercial use of virtualization will triple over the five year period beginning in 2004 [1]. While it is commonly held that OS virtualization improves the utility, manageability, and scalability of large-scale environments, we believe that it is not suf^Bcient in itself. In this paper we argue that the next key challenge facing these environments lies in the dramatically evolving requirements for the management of persistent storage.