Appliance Virtualization
The default installation of Protegrity appliances use hardware virtualization mode (HVM). An appliance can be reconfigured to use parallel virtualization mode (PVM) to optimize the performance of virtual guest machines. Protegrity supports the following virtual servers:
- Xen
- Microsoft Hyper-VP
- Linux KVM Hypervisor
The information in this section will provide details on appliance virtualization. Understanding some of the instructions and details will require some Xen knowledge and technical skills. The virtual server configuration is done with its own tools. The examples shown later in this section are for using paravirtualization with Xen. Xen hypervisor is a thin software layer that is inserted between the server hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more virtual servers, effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. Xen hypervisor changes are facilitated by the Xen Paravirtualization Tool.
For more information about Xen, and Xen hypervisor, refer http://www.xen.org/.
About switching from HVM to PVM
This section will also show how to switch from HVM to PVM. The following two main tasks are involved:
- Configuration changes on the guest machine, the appliance.
- Configuration changes on the virtual server.
The appliance configuration changes are facilitated by the Xen Paravirtualization tool, which is available in the appliance Tools menu, in the CLI Manager.