Rebooting Virtualization Research (Again)

Abstract

Visible or hidden, virtualization platforms remain the cornerstone of the cloud and the performance overheads of the latest generations have shrunk. Is hypervisor research dead? We argue that the upcoming trends of hardware disaggregation in the data center motivate a new chapter of virtualization research. We explain why the guest virtual machine abstraction is still relevant in such a new hardware environment and we discuss challenges and ideas for hypervisor and guest OS design in this context. Finally, we propose the architecture of a research platform to explore these questions.