Virtage: Hitachi's Virtualization Technology

This paper presents Virtage, Hitachipsilas virtualization technology, which enables logical partitioning of server platforms. We describe its key feature: hardware transparency. With the advantage of hardware transparency for logical servers, it is possible to provide the same guest operating system (OS) interface from both physical servers (non-virtualized servers) and logical servers. Virtage is hypervisor-type virtualization, and therefore has a natural performance advantage over host-emulation virtualization offerings because guest OSs can be simply and directly executed on the virtualized environment without host intervention. We demonstrate this lower overhead with performance experiments and explain how Virtage brings mainframe-class virtualization to blade servers.