Virtualization of Non-Volatile Ram

Abstract

Virtualization technology is powering today's cloud industry. Virtualization inserts a software layer, the hypervisor, below the Operating System, to manage multiple OS environments simultaneously. Offering numerous benefits such as fault isolation, load balancing, faster server provisioning, etc., virtualization occupies a dominant position, especially in IT infrastructure in data centers. Memory management is one of the core components of a hypervisor. Current implementations assume the underlying memory to be homogenous and volatile. However, with the emergence of NVRAM in the form of Storage Class Memory (SCM), this assumption remains no longer valid. New motherboard architectures will support several different memory classes each with distinct properties and characteristics. The hypervisor has to recognize, manage, and expose them separately to the different virtual machines. This study focuses on building a separate memory management module for Non-Volatile RAM in Xen hypervisor. We show that it can be efficiently implemented with a few code changes and minimal runtime performance overhead.