Intel Virtualization Technology: Hardware Support for Efficient Processor Virtualization

Virtualizing the physical resources of a computing system to improve sharing and utilization has been done for decades. Virtualization had once been confined to specialized server and mainframe systems, but improvements in the performance of platforms based on Intel technology now allow those platforms to efficiently support virtualization. However, the IA-32 and Itanium processor architectures pose a number of significant challenges to virtualization. The first generation of Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) for IA-32 and Itanium processors provides hardware support that simplifies processor virtualization, enabling reductions in virtual machine monitor (VMM) software size and complexity. Resulting VMMs can support a wider range of legacy and future operating systems (OSs) on the same physical platform while maintaining high performance. In this paper, we provide details of the virtualization challenges posed by IA-32 and Itanium processors; present an overview and furnish details of VT-x (Intel Virtualization Technology for the IA-32 architecture) and VT-i (Intel Virtualization Technology for the Itanium architecture); show how VT-x and VT-i address virtualization challenges; and finally provide examples of usage of the VT-x and VT-i architecture.