Issues of virtualisation and their impact on computing approaches Dissertation

Issues of virtualisation and their impact on computing approaches - Dissertation Example An investigation of the key characteristics of the implementation of virtualisation and its usefulness for future computation Amrik Singh Samra BSc. ... anagement platform 19 Figure 4: Virtual machine structures (Type I on left, Type II on right) 19 Figure 5: Functions and responsibilities of the VMM 20 Figure 6: The protection rings in the x86 architecture 23 Figure 7: Diagrammatic representation of paravirtualization 28 Figure 8: Illustration of seamless virtualisation in VirtualBox 30 List of tables Table 1: Table of Risks 11 Table 2: Types of VM emulators, their key features and examples 20 Table 3: Levels of abstraction involved in virtualisation technologies 21 Table 4: Key advantages and drawbacks for each level of abstraction 21 Table 5: Comparison of virtualisation types in terms of performance and flexibility 29 Application virtualisation – â€Å"The process of running software from a remote server† (EC-Council, 2010) Break out attack – â€Å"A situation in which criminals will escape from a virtual machine designed for guests in order to launch attacks against the hypervisor, allowing them to gain con trol over the host† (Esforsys, 2009c). High Performance Computing (HPC) – The use of parallel processing for running advanced programs quickly, efficiently and reliably Hypervisor – This is like the kernel or core of a virtualisation platform, also called the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) with access to the host’s physical hardware (VirtualisationAdmin, 2008). Network virtualisation – â€Å"A method of combining the available resources in a network by splitting up the available bandwidth into channels to particular servers or devices in real time† (EC-Council, 2010) Privileged Software Nucleus (PSN) - A miniature resident program in the operating system similar to a kernel (Exforsys, 2009) Run-Time System (RTS) – A piece of software designed to support the execution of a program Sandbox – The secure