Kersten, N. (2016):

Aufbau und Untersuchung eines Virtualisierungsclusters auf der Basis der ARMv7-Plattform

ARM-SoCs based on the ARMv7 architecture, popular for their low power consumption and widespread use in embedded systems, recently gained support for hardware virtualization through an optional instruction set extension called ARM Virtualization Extensions. This extension makes ARM processors suitable for use in virtualization clusters.

In this thesis an overview over virtualization on ARMv7-SoCs is given with a closer look at the hypervisors Xen and KVM as well as the differences to hardware virtualization on the x86 architecture which dominates the virtualization market so far. A virtualization cluster based on ARMv7-SoCs is designed and built and the gathered experience is documented. Benchmarks are run on the virtualization cluster and show that virtualization performance of KVM/ARM ranges from poor to competitive, depending on the scenario. Many unexpected challenges and problems were discovered along the way, increased time spendings on administration of clus\-ters using diverse hardware and the impossibility to have an universal installer for low-level software like Xen ARM for ARMv7-based systems are only few of them.

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