Beginner's Guide to Virtualization

Tony Su
KPLUG
November 7, 2018

Why is virtualization important?

  • Massive improvements in hardware utilization and efficiency including over-provisioning
  • Basis for practically all cloud computing (excluding containers, non-hypervisor cloud computing is for all purposes non-existent, there was an Oracle concept that once existed)

Major Platform benefits

  • Multitude of new backup and restore options
  • Portability
  • Hardware utilization
  • Provisioning (no new hardware may need to be purchased)
  • Availability (On Demand deployment)
  • Isolation
  • Disposability

Low Learning Curve

  • Builds on common concepts in the physical world

Differences

  • Most deployments will use bridge devices to implement networking
  • Security now involves a HostOS, not just the GuestOS
  • Multi-tenant management

Virtual Networking

  • The Bridge device

Guest VM

Bridge Device
br0
virbr0

Physical Network

Guest VM2

Type 1

Xen

Type 2

The Rest of the World (Virtualization)

Evolution

  • Software only (Early 1990's?)
  • Hardware Assist CPU and RAM only 2005/2006
  • Today - in process of virtualizing I/O (primrily devices) and implementing hardware pass-through
    Hardware pass-through allows a Guest (or Host) to monopolize real mode address to the device
  • SR-IOV - PCI-SIG Single Root I/O Virtualization
  • GPU - IOMMU input/output memory management unit

Bottom line consequences of evolutionary changes...
Hardware can, has been and is becoming commoditized

Choosing a virtualization technology

  • Student
  • Newbie
  • Developers (Includes work like media transcoding)

Virtualbox
VMware Player

Virtualbox VMware Player VMware Workstation ($200 or less)

Virtualbox (but no advanced GPU)
VMware
KVM
Xen
Hyper-V

Choosing a virtualization technology, cont.

  • Small business (Personal and On-site Servers)
  • Enterprise

Virtualbox (maybe)
VMware Workstation

Xen (particularly if staging for AWS)
KVM
VMware ESX
VMware ESXi
Hyper-V (MSWindows only)

Cross-distribution management tools

  • Libvirt
  • Vagrant

Hypervisor Security Issues

  • Vulnerabilities and Exploits have happened but are rare.
  • Patched quickly
  • A Spectre variant currently can theoretically hack username/passwords but today is difficult

GPU Pass-through

List of IOMMU supported hardware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...rting_hardware

Xen

https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo
https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough

KVM

From one of the architects of IOMMU
https://bluehatrecord.wordpress.com/...ith-fedora-22/
Most comprehensive reference
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...rough_via_OVMF
Debian reference, probably all applicable except installation
https://wiki.debian.org/VGAPassthrough

VMware

Requirements
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...rnalId=2142307
Configuration
http://www.dell.com/support/article/...hrough?lang=EN

Virtualbox

As usual, VBox is a bit behind the others without a clear guide for enabling GPU pass-through. The following link to the VBox Advanced Configuration documentation, specifically PCI passthrough in general and with a section on passing through a webcam
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch...pcipassthrough

Questions?

This slide deck is at

https://slides.com/tonysu/beginners-guide-to-virtualization

Beginner's Guide to Virtualization

By Tony Su

Made with Slides.com

Beginner's Guide to Virtualization

An Introduction to the history, technology and basics for deciding what virtualization to use

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