Multi-Hypervisor Nested Virtual Machines

 Background: 

Standard nested virtualization allows a hypervisor to run other hypervisors as guests, i.e. a level-0 (L0) hypervisor can run multiple level-1 (L1) hypervisors, each of which can run multiple level-2 (L2) virtual machines (VMs), with each L2 VM is restricted to run on only one L1 hypervisor.

 Technology Overview: 

 Span provides a Multi-hypervisor VM in which a single VM can simultaneously run on multiple hypervisors, which permits a VM to benefit from different services provided by multiple hypervisors that co-exist on a single physical machine. Span allows (a) the memory footprint of the VM to be shared across two hypervisors, and (b) the responsibility for CPU and I/O scheduling to be distributed among the two hypervisors. Span VMs can achieve performance comparable to traditional (single-hypervisor) nested VMs for common benchmarks 

 Advantages: 

 

• Users can run their own hypervisors in IaaS clouds.
• Live migration of hypervisors + guest VMs as a single entity.
• Hypervisor-level intrusion detection/prevention.

 Intellectual Property Summary: 

U.S. 9,798,567
Patent rights available for licensing.