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Experiment No. 3
Aim: To Study and implement Bare-metal Virtualization using Xen, HyperV or VMware Esxi.

Theory:

Bare-metal hypervisor
A bare-metal hypervisor, also known as a Type 1 hypervisor, is virtualization software that has
been installed directly onto the computing hardware.
This type of hypervisor controls not only the hardware, but one or more guest operating systems
(OSes). In comparison, a hosted hypervisor, or Type 2 hypervisor, runs within the host OS, so the
underlying hardware is managed by the host OS.
Bare-metal hypervisors feature high availability and resource management; they also provide
better performance, scalability and stability because of their direct access to the hardware. On the
other hand, the built-in device drivers can limit hardware support.
Examples of popular bare-metal hypervisors are Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and
VMware ESXi.

What is the difference between bare-metal and hosted hypervisors?

A bare-metal or Type 1 hypervisor is significantly different from a hosted or Type 2 hypervisor.

Although both are capable of hosting virtual machines (VMs), a hosted hypervisor runs on top of
a parent OS, whereas a bare-metal hypervisor is installed directly onto the server hardware. This
difference in the way that the hypervisors are installed leads to several other key differences.

One of the biggest differences between a bare-metal hypervisor and a hosted hypervisor lies in the
way that VMs consume hardware resources. Because a bare-metal hypervisor is installed directly
on the server hardware, a VM can access the hardware directly. Conversely, a VM that is running
on a hosted hypervisor must pass hardware requests through the parent OS. This means that a
baremetal hypervisor generally offers far better VM performance than a hosted hypervisor.

Similarly, a bare-metal hypervisor offers better security than a hosted hypervisor. Because a hosted
hypervisor is dependent on an underlying OS, security vulnerabilities within that OS could
potentially be used to penetrate VMs and the guest OSes running on them.

Bare-metal hypervisor use cases

Bare-metal hypervisors are best suited for organizations that require high performance,
management capabilities, scalability and strong security.
As bare-metal hypervisor is installed directly on the server hardware the VMs run at the hardware's
native speed, as opposed to having their performance affected by an OS that is running on the host.

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Bare-metal hypervisors also tend to be more scalable than hosted hypervisors. Hosted hypervisors'
scalability is limited by the underlying OS. If the OS doesn't support clustering or if it only supports
a relatively small amount of memory, then a hypervisor running on top of the OS will also be
subject to those limitations. Because bare-metal hypervisors aren't installed on top of a host OS,
they tend to be highly scalable.
The bare-metal hypervisor vendors also generally offer a management console that is designed to
support large-scale hypervisor deployments. Some examples are VMware vCenter Server or
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. These consoles make it practical to manage
large-scale deployments.
Finally, because a bare-metal hypervisor isn't running on top of an underlying OS, it tends to be
far more secure than a hosted hypervisor.
Bare-metal virtualization is ideally suited to large organizations or to those organizations with
significant performance or security requirements. Hosted hypervisors tend to be a better fit for lab
environments or for use in SMB environments.

Benefits and drawbacks of bare-metal hypervisors

Like any other technology, there are benefits and drawbacks to bare-metal virtualization. These
include:

Benefits
1. Performance: VMs can run at native hardware speeds.
2. Security: VMs aren't affected by vulnerabilities that might exist in an underlying OS, as
would be the case for a hosted hypervisor.
3. Scalability: Enterprise grade bare-metal hypervisors support the creation of large failover
clusters, and can generally take advantage of all a server's hardware resources -- memory,
CPU, etc.
4. Manageability: Bare-metal hypervisor vendors offer management consoles that enable
virtualization hosts to be collectively managed through a single console.

Drawbacks
1. Cost: Bare-metal hypervisors tend to be significantly more expensive than hosted
hypervisors. They also require dedicated hardware.
2. Complexity: Enterprise class bare-metal hypervisors can be quite complex and there might
be a substantial learning curve associated with their use.
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Top bare-metal hypervisor vendors and products

There are several major vendors that produce bare-metal hypervisors. Here are some of the leading
bare-metal hypervisors:

● Citrix XenServer
● Linux KVM
● Microsoft Hyper-V
● Nutanix AHV
● VMware ESXi

Xen

Xen is an open source hypervisor based on paravirtualization. It is the most popular application of
paravirtualization. Xen has been extended to compatible with full virtualization using
hardwareassisted virtualization. It enables high performance to execute guest operating system.
This is probably done by removing the performance loss while executing the instructions requiring
significant handling and by modifying portion of the guest operating system executed by Xen, with
reference to the execution of such instructions. Hence this especially support x86, which is the
most used architecture on commodity machines and servers.

Figure – Xen Architecture and Guest OSnManagement

Above figure describes the Xen Architecture and its mapping onto a classic x86 privilege model.
A Xen based system is handled by Xen hypervisor, which is executed in the most privileged mode
and maintains the access of guest operating system to the basic hardware. Guest operating system
are run between domains, which represents virtual machine instances.

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Installation of Citrix Xenserver 6.5 Guide

1. The first step in the installation is to download the XenServer ISO file. This can easily be
accomplished by visiting the link above or using the ‘wget‘ utility on a Linux system.

# wget -c
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/10175/XenServer-6.5.0-xenserver.org-install-cd.iso

Now burn the ISO to a CD or using ‘dd‘ to copy the ISO to a flash drive.

# dd if=XenServer-6.5.0-xenserver.org-install-cd.iso of=</path/to/usb/drive>

2. Now place the media into the system that XenServer will be installed and boot to that
media. Upon successful boot the user should be greeted by the wonderful Citrix XenServer
boot splash.

XenServer Boot Menu

3. At this point simply press enter to begin the booting process. This will boot the user into the
XenServer installer. The first screen will ask the user to provide a language selection.
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Select XenServer Installation Language

4. The next screen asks the user to confirm the reason for booting to this media as well as
provide the option to load extra hardware drivers if needed. In this particular case, it is to
install XenServer to the machine so it is safe to click “OK”.

Load XenServer Device Driver

5. The next prompt is the obligatory EULA (End User License Agreement). Feel free to read
the whole thing, as your supposed to anyways right, otherwise using the keyboard arrows
move the cursor over to the “Accept EULA” button and hit enter.

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Accept License Agreement

6. The next screen requests the installation device. In this example the RAID setup on the
server is where XenServer will be installed.
The RAID system is reflected as “sda – 556 GB [IBM ServeRAID-MR10k]” For this guide,
thin provisioning is not necessary. Make sure the the asterisk ( * ) character is next to the hard
drive selection to install XenServer and tab to the “OK” button.

Select XenServer Virtual Machine Storage

7. The next screen will prompt the user for the location of the installation files. Since the
installer was boot locally with a CD/DVD/USB, make sure to select the “Local Media”
option.
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Select XenServer Installation Source

8. The next step allows for the installation of Supplemental Packs (SP) at the time of install.
For this guide, none of the supplemental packs available will be installed at this point but
will be covered later once XenServer is up and running.

Select Supplemental Packs

9. The next screen will ask if the user wishes to verify that the installer media is not corrupt.
Generally, this is a good idea but is a personal choice. All in all the verification on this test
server took about 3 minutes from a CD.

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Verify XenServer Installation Media

Checking Base Pack

Verification Successful
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10. Once the verification is completed, if selected during install, the XenServer installer will ask
the user to setup some system information.
The first prompt will be to set the root user’s password. Now, since XenServer will be the
underlying system to potentially several important virtualized servers, it is imperative that the
password be secured as well as sufficiently complex!
Important: Do not forget this password either as there will not be any other users on the system
once the installer finishes!

Set XenServer Root Password

11. The next screen will ask the user to chose a management interface. The number of interfaces
that shows up will vary from system to system and the management interface doesn’t have to
be a separate interface. A separate interface can be used to secure administrative access to
the hypervisor itself.

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Configure XenServer Network

12. Once the management interface is selected, the system will prompt for how to obtain an IP
address for the management interface. This step will obviously vary from site to site as well.

Set XenServer IP Address

13. After determining the IP address information for the XenServer, the system will ask for a
hostname to be set as well as DNS server configuration.

Hostname and DNS Configuration

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14. The next three screens will go through the steps of setting up time zones as well as the
method for keeping track of time. Generally, Network Time Protocol is suggested for
keeping system time synchronized on systems but again this will vary from location to
location.

If a network time server isn’t available or the XenServer doesn’t have access to the Internet time
servers, the installer will allow for manual time setting.

Set Time Zone

Set Time Using NTP

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Add NTP Servers

15. At this point all of the initial configuration parameters will be complete and the XenServer
installer will be ready to begin the installation of the hypervisor.

WARNING – Continuing at this point WILL ERASE ALL DATA on the target disks!

Confirm XenServer Installation Drive

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16. The installation will take some time but a progress bar will be displayed. Once the installer
is done, it will prompt the user to restart the system to boot to the newly installed hypervisor
(be sure to remove the XenServer installation disk upon reboot).

Preparing XenServer Installation

XenServer Installation Complete

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17. Upon removing the installation media and rebooting the system, the user should be
presented with the Citrix XenServer splash page. Allow the system to continue booting.

Citrix XenServer Booting

18. Once the booting has completed, the system will present the XenServer control page.

XenServer Configuration Page

Congratulations! XenServer was successfully installed and is now ready to have any
hotfixes/supplemental packs applied, storage repositories designated, and ultimately virtual
machines created. The next step in this series will address the methods available to patch a
XenServer system with patches from Citrix.
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Hypervisor

IBM invented the hypervisor in the 1960s for its mainframe computers. A hypervisor or virtual
machine monitor (VMM) is software or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. Virtual
machines act just like independent, stand-alone processors and appear to be independent
processors to the user, but actually share a chip with other virtual machines. Each VM interacts
with outside world in its usual way, issuing calls and control instructions to hardware and network
devices, memory, and CPUs. But behind the scenes, the hypervisor intercepts all these calls and
instructions. The hypervisor carries them out in a way that prevents them from interfering with
other VMs, and that respects the resource needs of each VM.

Although the concept of virtual machines has suddenly become popular in the past decade, IBM
invented it in the 1960s for its mainframe computers. Nowadays, some hypervisors are embedded
into custom devices.

When in use, the hypervisor is called a host machine and each VM managed by this host is called
a guest machine. The hypervisor shares the system resources between the VMs while keeping them
isolated, so that no user can accidentally or maliciously see or change another user’s data. With
the help of the hypervisor, a system can run multiple operating systems at once and use the system
resources in an efficient way.

Two types of hypervisors exist, called simply type-1 and type-2. The type-1 hypervisor, also
known as native or bare-metal, runs directly on the hardware and control the resources and manage
guest VMs. Type-1 hypervisors needs their own drivers to interact with the particular hardware
they run on. At the time of writing this article, modern and popular type-1 hypervisors include Xen
Project, XCP-ng, Citrix Hypervisor (formerly known as XenServer), Microsoft Hyper-V, and
VMware ESXi.

The type-2 hypervisor is a computer program that needs an operating system to work. This
program acts as an interface between the operating system and guest VMs, and shares
resources between them. The type-2 hypervisor represents each VM as a process to the
underlying
operating system. Type-2 hypervisors use the drivers supplied by the host OS. At the time of
writing this article, popular type-2 hypervisors include Oracle VirtualBox, VMware
Workstation Pro and Player, VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, FreeBSD bhyve, and KVM.

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Type-1 and type-2 hypervisors have different pros and cons:

The pros of type-1 hypervisors lie in performance and security. It offers high performance because
the hypervisor has direct access to the hardware. Security is also more reliable on type-1 than
type2, because there is no interface between the hypervisor and CPU.

The main con of type-1 hypervisors is that GUI management of the VMs requires a separate
machine. For example, after installing XCP-ng on a machine, it is is dedicated to XCP-ng and
cannot run a shell or desktop alongside it. The result is that you need another machine to connect
to XCP-ng and create and manage your VMs. In contrast, many hypervisors like Xen and
Microsoft Hyper-V let you run another operating system next to the hypervisor on the same
machine. Xen even allows a parallel desktop environment, which is possible but not recommended
with Microsoft Hyper-V because of potential vulnerabilities. All these hypervisors, though, can be
managed from the command line.

The pro of type-2 hypervisor is simplicity of management. First, you don’t need to install additional
software to manage the virtual machines running on type-2 hypervisors. This trait makes type-2
virtualization attractive in development environments. You can run and test on multiple operating
systems simultaneously without knowing a lot about virtualization. This does not mean that the
type-1 hypervisors are inappropriate for the development environments, just that some users find
type-2 hypervisors easier.

The cons of type-2 hypervisor spring from its need to run on another operating system to access
the hardware resources such as memory, devices, and networking. Thus, performance is inferior
to type-1 hypervisors, and security is potentially weaker because an attacker who compromises the
host OS can gain access to all the VMs that running on the host.

Why Virtualization?

Virtualization can bring many benefits to your organization and give it new power and capacity.
The technology has become widespread and has been extensively discussed in the trade press, but
I’ll highlight some of the key benefits that apply to Xen.:
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Reduction in costs

Virtualization can reduce the costs of your IT infrastructure. In a non-virtualized environment,

each service gets a dedicated physical server. Sharing a computer system among multiple services
has a high risk. But today’s hardware is very powerful, so dedicating a server for one service or
application just wastes resources. A virtualized environment lets a single physical server uses host
many VMs safely. Each of these VMs can run a different operating system and offer different
applications. Fewer physical servers mean lower costs, lower energy use, and less physical space.

Reduce downtime and faster recovery

For your customers, nothing is more painful than a service outage. When a disaster affects a
physical server, IT staff must scramble to replace or fix it. Depending on the crisis, this could take
hours or even days. In a virtualized environment, you can easily clone the virtual machines that
have been affected in mere minutes.

Creativity

Why waste your IT team’s time on maintaining a lot of physical servers? VMs can be installed,
updated, and maintained the with a few clicks. Your IT team can spend their time on other things,
such as learning and implementing new technologies.

Control

Virtualization gives you more control over the development process. Consider a new update for an
operating system or an application. You want to test this update to ensure that no problem happens.
Clone the VM, apply the updates, and test it. If no problem appears, then apply the updates to the
main environment.

Help the Earth’s environment

When you cut down on the number of physical servers in your company, it will lead to reduction
the amount of power being consumed. Fewer servers allow a smaller carbon footprint and less
electronic junk.

Conclusion: Hence we have successfully studied and implemented Bare-metal Virtualization

using Xen and HyperV.

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