Type1 (Bare Metal) Hypervisor for Desktops/Laptops–XenClient

 

Note: This product has been discontinued by Citrix. The below package is no more available for Download!

 

Recommended Reading: Introduction to Virtualization, Hypervisors.

For a long time, Type1 (Bare Metal) hypervisors are reserved for server environments. They are known for speed, consistency and stability during heavy loads. They are the only hypervisors that provides ‘near native’ performance. Typically Type-1 hypervisors are not available or used under traditional desktops/laptops due the the below reasons.

 

A. Issues with Type1 hypervisors (For Desktop usage)

1. No GUI for Type-1 Hypervisors

Type1 hypervisors are installed to a machine, without any GUI. Most often the physical host machine (In which hypervisor has installed) will be controlled by a terminal/client installed on a second machine. This is perfect for a server scenario, where most of the time, the machines are sealed inside Datacenters and managed remotely.

This setup is not at all viable for a desktop/laptop machine, as user will be directly interacting with the machine.

2. Hardware compatibility

Desktops/Laptops are offered by a diverse list of manufacturers, than any server counter parts. So there is a huge effort for supporting all these diverse hardware environment, to any hypervisors targeting desktops. This is not the case with servers, as there are a few vendors manufacturing servers, as compared to personnel computer industry.

So typically Desktops/Laptops lives with Type2 hypervisors like Virtualbox, VirutalPC, VMWare Workstation e.t.c. Though KVM can be considered as a Type1 hypervisor, that statement is not completely true, as it requires an host OS to be present.

B. A true Type1/Bare Metal Desktop Hypervisor – XenClient

Does this means, desktops has to live with only Type2 hypervisors?

The answer is ‘No’, as Citrix has now come up with a BareMetal/Type1 hypervisor for desktop/laptop environments. It is a “Type1 BareMetal Desktop Hypervisor”. The product is ‘XenClient’. More specifically the hypervisor is called ‘XenClient Engine’.

The product can be used free, for managing up to 10 virtual machines. It has the following advantages that are typically required for any desktop/laptop environments and that are not available in server environments.

i. Hypervisor is integrated with GUI, for managing virtual machines.

The hypervisor comes with a GUI frontend, by which we can create and manage virtual machine. So a single machine can be used to host virtual machine as well as managing them using GUI.

Also remote management is possible with client products installed on other machines.

j. Additional utilities are available.

One good thing with this desktop edition is, it contains ‘Google Chrome’ browser. It’s a must utility that every desktop can’t live without.

C. Download and Configure – XenClient in your desktop

XenClient is free for use (To create/manage up to 10 virtual machines), though it requires registration.

Go to XenClient Home Page and click on ‘Download Now’ button. You many need to create an account next, by providing a valid email id and other details. Once done you will redirected to the ‘XenClient’ download page.

Download ‘XenClient Enterprise Engine’ ISO file (See above fig.). Now burn it to a DVD and use it for installation. The installation procedure can be found in the manual, Please read it carefully. Normally the setup will install into the first available free space in the first hard disk and format it with LVM partition format (logical volume manager).

For experimental usage, we’ve installed ‘XenClient’ as a KVM Guest, as KVM supports nested virtualization. To install XenClient engine as a KVM guest, you can find the procedure here. Below given the screenshots from our XenClient Engine installed as a KVM Guest.

For more management capabilities, we can use ‘XenClient Synchronizer’, that can be installed into any windows machine (.NET Framework should be installed). The free usage allows us to manage at most 10 virtual machines.

Installing KVM in Lubuntu14.04 with Nested Virtualization Support

Virtualization can be quite useful. Rather than disrupting our base system, we can create virtual machines, try things out, snapshot it, restore back and throw away once done. We can try out a new update’s stability in a virtual machine, before applying to your physical machine. Also we can run other OS’s along side with your OS of choice, like running Windows 8.1 along side of your Ubuntu installation without a reboot. In virtualization terms, our physical computer will be called as Host and the virtual machines created are called ‘Guests’. The software that provide virtualization capability to your physical computer, is called Hypervisor.

Hypervisors are categorized in to Type1 (Bare Metal) and Type2.

Type1 will be directly installed to the ‘Host’ machine and it does not requires any existing operating system to work. It will directly talk to the hardware and will manage virtual machines.  So Type1 hypervisors are special OS’s, that are specifically designed for virtualization tasks. So they provide ‘near native’ performance for virtual machines. Examples are VMWare ESXi, XenClient and XenServer.

Type2 requires an existing ‘OS’ installation and will be installed on top of it. For managing physical hardware resources, Type2 hypervisors will talk to the installed OS (Called Host OS), and Host OS will in turn talk to the hardware. So due to this double indirection, Type2 hypervisors are bit slower than Type1. Examples are VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation and VirtualPC.

There are certain OS’s that are neither Type1, nor Type2, like KVM. In fact KVM is sometime called as Type1, but it does requires an existing OS installation to work. The KVM Hypervisor module itself is implemented as a ‘Kernel Module’ and hence, it might be providing near native performance. Still user space tools are required to manage virtual machines like ‘libvirt’ and ‘qemu-kvm’, that are installed on top of the Host OS.

Whether it’s Type1 or Type2, most of the Hypervisors are designed to use ‘Hardware Assisted Virtualization’ to boost ‘Guest machine’s’ performance. In other terms they make use of your physical computer's processor virtualization extensions (AMD-V for AMD processors, and Intel-VT for Intel processors), to improve ‘Virtual Machine’ performance. This requires ‘Virtualization Extension’ to be supported by your ‘Processor’ (And it does for all recent Intel/AMD processors) and need to be enabled under your ‘BIOS’. Certain hypervisors (like Virtualbox) can work without ‘Hardware Assisted Virtualization’, and that scenario is called ‘Full Virtualization’ where performance will be much lower.

Some of the Hypervisors strictly requires ‘Hardware Assisted Virtualization’ to be available and enabled in BIOS and is recommended as well. Example XenClient, VMWare ESXi.

OK, that’s all about virtualization and hypervisors. Now consider an extreme scenario. You want to virtualize a Hypervisor itself! That means you would like to install a Hypervisor inside an Hypervisor and the nested Hypervisor demands ‘Virtualization Extensions’. This scenario requires the Hypervisor running on the Host, should be able to pass through the ‘Virtualization Extension’ (AMD-V, Intel-VT) to the nested Hypervisor (i.e The Guest Hypervisor, which is running as a virtual machine). This is called ‘Nested Virtualization’. Using this technique, you can test various Hypervisors in virtual environment, before the actual deployment to checkout the features and limitations. You can try create virtual machines inside the nested hypervisor, which itself is a virtual machine. Sounds interesting right?

For common purposes, we heavily use Virtualbox (A Type2 Hypervisor), as it is quite simple to setup and have a very friendly GUI for managing virtual machines. But it lacks on ‘Nested Virtualization’ support for the guests.

Recently we’d to virtualize a Bare Metal hypervisor, named ‘XenClient’ that mandates ‘Processor Virtualization Extensions’ to be available on it’s virtual host (i.e Virtual machine, on which ‘XenClient’ got installed).

XenClient is a ‘Bare Metal’ Type-1, hypervisor specifically designed for Desktops and Laptops. Though the hardware support is somewhat limited for older version, the compatibility base is now getting better with the latest versions. XenClient requires ‘Processor Virtualization Extensions’ to be available and it has one more additional requirement, It does requires hard disk to be attached to SATA Controller. It does not support IDE controller for hard disks.

So to virtualize XenClient, we cannot use Virtualbox, as it does not support nested virtualization. We cannot use ‘VMWare Workstation’ either, as it does not support SATA controllers, though it supports nested virtualization.

As per our experience, we found that ‘KVM’ (Kernel Virtual Machine) is the best option for such nested virtualization scenarios, where you want to run a Hypervisor as a guest inside a Hypervisor. KVM does allows nested virtualization through some minor tweaks. It also supports SATA controllers for hard disks. KVM is by default available in mainline Linux kernel. The below steps explains, setting up KVM in Lubuntu14.04 host with Nested Virtualization features.

1. Check whether, your processor support ‘Virtualization Extensions’? (Intel-VT/AMD-V)

Run the following command in the terminal.

“egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo”

If 0 it means that your CPU doesn't support hardware virtualization. If 1 or more it does - but you still need to make sure that virtualization is enabled in the BIOS.

Alternatively, you may execute: “kvm-ok”. This should return the below.

INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

2. Install KVM and Management Tools

Use the below command line to install the Qemu emulation layer and the virtual machine manager.

“sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin virt-manager bridge-utils”

Add the current user to the ‘libvirtd’ group.

“sudo adduser `id -un` libvirtd”

3. Enable Nested Virtualization In KVM

By default nested virtualization is not enabled in KVM, It needs to be activated explicitly. First try check its already enabled by you previously, by issuing the below command;

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested

If the output is ‘N’. Then enable it by issuing the below command.

echo 'options kvm_intel nested=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/qemu-system-x86.conf

We’re done setting up KVM. Now only thing remember is to enable ‘Nested Virtualization’ while creating a virtual machine using ‘Virt-Manager’, that is explained in the next step.

3. Created a virtual machine with Nested Virtualization Support.

In this exercise, we’re installing ‘XenClient’ (A Type1, Bare Metal Desktop Hypervisor) as a guest in KVM. Create a virtual machine and install ‘XenClient’. Before install, ensure the below settings, for the virtual machine.

Ensure ‘vmx’ settings as ‘require’. This enables the nested virtualization available to the KVM guest.

Below are the settings specifically required for ‘XenClient’.

Ensure, Virtual disk is attached to ‘SATA’ controller.

Ensure, Video model as ‘VMVGA’. NB: This is important, ‘XenClient’ only seems to detect this video model only under KVM.

Here you are! Below figure shows our successfully installed and running ‘XenClient’ as a KVM Guest.

Note: If you’re getting the below error while starting a nested guest, inside XenClient, check XenClient system requirements and verify your hardware compatibility. Your processor, chipset, and BIOS settings should support VT-x and VT-d (For inter processors) and must be enabled.

4. Appendix.

Read more on KVM installation in Ubuntu here.

Read more on configuring Nested KVM under Ubuntu14.04 here.