PVMsim: A parallel simulation platform to evaluate virtual machines

Server consolidation is becoming an increasingly popular technique to manage and utilize system [1]. In server consolidation, multiple server workloads are deployed onto Virtual Machines (VMs), which then run on a single, more-powerful server. In fact, multi-core processors provide excellent opportunities to expand server consolidation. In order to research how to support virtualization better from the perspective of multi-core architecture design, and verify the function and performance of some novel virtualization technologies, we need a simulation platform to evaluate virtual machines efficiently. However, nowadays most of the simulators which support virtualization are all full-system. And most of them have really complicated state and code space, and therefore lead to rather slow simulation speed. In this paper we present a parallel user-level simulator, PVMsim, inside which processor and memory virtualization functions are provided. We implement the PVMsim in three steps: 1) hardware virtualization, 2) implement communication mechanism between different virtual machines thread, 3) implement synchronization mechanism between different virtual machines thread.