Scale and performance in the Denali isolation kernel

Abstract

This paper describes the Denali isolation kernel, an operating system architecture that safely multiplexes a large number of untrusted Internet services on shared hardware. Denali's goal is to allow new Internet services to be "pushed" into third party infrastructure, relieving Internet service authors from the burden of acquiring and maintaining physical infrastructure. Our isolation kernel exposes a virtual machine abstraction, but unlike conventional virtual machine monitors, Denali does not attempt to emulate the underlying physical architecture precisely, and instead modifies the virtual architecture to gain scale, performance, and simplicity of implementation. In this paper, we first discuss design principles of isolation kernels, and then we describe the design and implementation of Denali. Following this, we present a detailed evaluation of Denali, demonstrating that the overhead of virtualization is small, that our architectural choices are warranted, and that we can successfully scale to more than 10,000 virtual machines on commodity hardware.