The Challenge: As users increasingly rely on the power of computer for everyday tasks, effectively managing the machines supplying that computing power is becoming more and more important. What can Intel do to improve system management and make it easier for users to recover from hardware or software failures?

The Solution: Intel Research has been exploring the application of virtual machine technology to this system management challenge. One project uses virtualization to capture each user's entire computing state such that it can be centrally managed-enabling effective virus scanning, automatic full-system backup, and rapid environment migration. This methodology provides resilience in the presence of hardware or software failures for individual users. It also provides a tool for enterprise catastrophe recovery in the event of building fires or other disasters that affect many users simultaneously. The system is now in pilot deployment at Carnegie Mellon University.

In another project, Intel researchers are collaborating with the University of Cambridge to develop a virtual machine monitor called Xen. This software partitions a computer into several virtual machines, enabling multiple users to share the same machine concurrently, with little or no impact on performance, while ensuring they can't read or modify one another's data. Each user has the illusion of having his or her own machine.

Xen also enables peripheral drivers to be run in a separate virtual machine to the operating system. This provides a high level of robustness against device driver failures: instead of a complete machine crash on the failure of a device driver, the failure is isolated to the virtual machine, enabling a new virtual machine to be started with an intact device driver.

Researchers are now focused on enhancing the security of Xen. This will provide trusted and secure execution environments that support government, personal (banking, for example) and enterprise applications for servers and desktop computers.

Potential Impact: Virtual machine technology will increase the productivity of computing assets and enable corporations to manage them more efficiently. Individual users will benefit from increased flexibility and reliability of computers running virtual machine software, and corporations will benefit from decreased cost of operation.

Read an article by Intel Research Cambridge lab director, Derek McAuley, entitled "Personal Computing And The Power Of Illusion" that talks more about the Xen project and virtualization. Published on 01 February 2005 in the IEE.