Optimizing virtual machines using hybrid virtualization

Minimizing virtualization overhead and improving the reliability of virtual machines are challenging when establishing virtual machine cluster. Paravirtualization and hardware-assisted virtualization are two mainstream solutions for modern system virtualization. Hardware-assisted virtualization is superior in CPU and memory virtualization and becoming the leading solution, yet paravirtualization is still valuable in some aspects as it is capable of shortening the disposal path of I/O virtualization. Thus we propose the hybrid virtualization which runs the paravirtualized guest in the hardware-assisted virtual machine container to take advantage of both. Experiment results indicate that our hybrid solution outweighs origin paravirtualization by nearly 30% in memory intensive test and 50% in microbenchmarks. Meanwhile, compared with the origin hardware-assisted virtual machine, hybrid guest owns over 16% improvement in I/O intensive workloads.

► We propose an optimized virtualization solution, termed hybrid virtualization, which runs the paravirtualized guest in the hardware-assisted virtual machine container.
► We construct a novel mechanism of uniform timer management to solve the legacy problem of timer synchronization in the virtualized environment.
► We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluation is to verify the performance improvement of hybrid virtualization.