Hardware Virtualization Support In INTEL, AMD And IBM Power Processors

Abstract: At present, the mostly used and developed mechanism is hardware virtualization which provides a common platform to run multiple operating systems and applications in independent partitions. More precisely, it is all about resource virtualization as the term hardware virtualization is emphasized. In this paper, the aim is to find out the advantages and limitations of current virtualization techniques, analyze their cost and performance and also depict which forthcoming hardware virtualization techniques will able to provide efficient solutions for multiprocessor operating systems. This is done by making a methodical literature survey and statistical analysis of the benchmark reports provided by SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) and TPC (Transaction processing Performance Council). Finally, this paper presents the current aspects of hardware virtualization which will help the IT managers of the large organizations to take effective decision while choosing server with virtualization support. Again, the future works described in section 4 of this paper focuses on some real world challenges such as abstraction of multiple servers, language level virtualization, pre-virtualization etc. which may be point of great interest for the researchers.