Chapter 20. xVM Hypervisor
IN THIS CHAPTER
xVM concepts
Getting started with xVM
Advanced xVM administration
Live migration
Virtual devices
xVM troubleshooting
The xVM hypervisor is the type 1 hypervisor virtualization solution provided in OpenSolaris for the x86 hardware architecture. Using xVM, system resources can be shared among domains, each of which is an isolated environment that runs a standalone operating system. The OpenSolaris xVM hypervisor is based on the Xen open source project.
Note
The xVM name is used on a variety of OpenSolaris-related software components that work with virtualization. In this chapter, xVM is used specifically to refer to the hypervisor based on the Xen project. Sun Microsystems also offers their xVM Server product, which is a self-contained virtualization appliance built around the hypervisor and the xVM Ops Center management tools. This chapter focuses on interacting with the hypervisor directly, not as an appliance as offered by the xVM Server product.
xVM runs both paravirtualized and fully virtualized guest operating systems. OpenSolaris has been paravirtualized to run on the hypervisor as either the control domain or a guest OS. This paravirtualization provides better performance when interacting with the hypervisor than a domain running a fully virtualized OS.
In addition to the standard virtualization benefits provided by running an OS on a hypervisor, xVM offers features such as the capability to suspend and resume a running domain, as well as live ...
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