How Virtualization Cuts Data Center Costs and Boosts Efficiency

Virtualization consolidates underutilized servers, eliminating the need to purchase new hardware for new projects, thereby lowering capital costs and proportionally reducing power, cooling, and space operational expenses.

Advanced virtualization management and cloud‑operation software create a secure, auditable data‑center environment that provides lower‑cost, higher‑service‑level infrastructure, enabling rapid response to business department needs.

Through virtualization management and cloud‑operation software, IT infrastructure can be centrally managed, streamlining operations, monitoring, reporting, and remote access.

Solution 1: Para‑Virtualization

Para‑virtualization (e.g., Xen) integrates guest‑OS code that cooperates closely with the hypervisor, allowing the guest OS to work efficiently with the hypervisor.

On the hypervisor, the guest OS includes code related to para‑virtualization, enabling tight coordination.

Hypervisor provides a hypercall interface to satisfy critical kernel operations of the guest OS such as memory management, interrupts, and time synchronization.

Solution 2: Binary Translation (BT)

Full virtualization (e.g., VMware ESX) uses binary translation to replace sensitive non‑privileged instructions with privileged equivalents executed in Ring 0, while non‑privileged instructions run directly.

Privileged instructions first trap to the VMM, which emulates them before returning control to the guest OS, which resumes execution from the point of interruption.

Hardware‑Assisted Virtualization

CPU‑level hardware virtualization (e.g., Intel VT‑i) and memory virtualization provide additional support for virtual machines.

I/O Virtualization

Guest device drivers issue I/O requests that are intercepted by the KVM module, placed into an I/O shared page, and processed by QEMU and hardware emulation code before the results are returned to the guest.

After processing, QEMU receives the I/O operation details, hands them to hardware emulation code, and then places the results back into the shared I/O page, notifying the KVM module to deliver the results to the guest.

KVM module reads the I/O shared page, obtains the operation result, and returns it to the client VM.

Major Hypervisor Products

KVM/ARM Virtualization Principles

In x86 architecture, root mode corresponds to privileged operation, while non‑root mode corresponds to the traditional CPU modes (Ring 0‑Ring 3). Both root and non‑root modes have parallel privilege levels.

In ARM, the virtualization mode exists alongside existing modes and holds higher privileges than the management mode.