#vmcs

Hypervisor From Scratch – Part 5: Setting up VMCS & Running Guest Code

( Original text by Sinaei )

Introduction

Hello and welcome back to the fifth part of the “Hypervisor From Scratch” tutorial series. Today we will be configuring our previously allocated Virtual Machine Control Structure (VMCS) and in the last, we execute VMLAUNCH and enter to our hardware-virtualized world! Before reading the rest of this part, you have to read the previous parts as they…

Awesome set of notes about VMCS and nested VMs including performance measurements. Well worth a couple of hours reading.

A good overview which uses hyperV

Excellent RHEL-6.5 centric document from RedHat on how to use RDO to install a proper multi-node setup. Am trying to recreate this now using the CentOS7 base image.

This summary of VMCS suggests that we need Intel-VX, EPT and for any serious nested KVM work.

Here are some contenders:

$770 optiplex3020 i5-4570 DDR3 sdram (16GB max). 2 DIMMslots.

$370 barebones supermicro-5030A-iL DDR3-1600/PC3-12800 SDRAM (32G max), SATA600, lots of expansion potential

$890 Optiplex 9020 8GB, 1x550G SATA 7200 supports up to 32GB nonECC 1600 DDR3 SDRAM in 4 DIMM slots. Avoid the small form factor which only has half o this.

Dell xps 8700 comes with a 4thgen processor (VMCS, EPT, VX) 8GB DDR3 ram with expansion up to 32GB, a 500GB SATA 7200 drive with room for up to 3). $750