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A virtualized system includes a new layer of software, the virtual machine monitor. The VMM's principal role is to arbitrate accesses to the underlying physical host platform's resources so that multiple operating systems (which are guests of the VMM) can share them. The VMM presents to each guest OS a set of virtual platform interfaces that constitute a virtual machine (VM). Once confined to specialized, proprietary, high-end server and mainframe systems, virtualization is now becoming more broadly available and is supported in off-the-shelf systems based on Intel architecture (IA) hardware. This development is due in part to the steady performance improvements of IA-based systems, which mitigates traditional virtualization performance overheads. Intel virtualization technology provides hardware support for processor virtualization, enabling simplifications of virtual machine monitor software. Resulting VMMs can support a wider range of legacy and future operating systems while maintaining high performance.
Uhlig et al. (Sun,) studied this question.