- SVISTA
SVISTA (Serenity Virtual Station) is one of the commercial
software products promoted bySerenity Systems International . The workstation software consists of avirtual machine suite forIntel x86 -compatible computers which allows the creation and execution of multiple x86 virtual computers simultaneously. Each virtual machine instance can execute its own guestoperating system including Windows,Linux , OS/2 and BSD variants. In simple terms, SVISTA allows one physical machine to run numerous operating systems simultaneously.Description
The
computer and operating system instance that executes the SVISTA process is referred to as the "host machine". Instances of operating systems running inside a virtual machine are referred to as "guest virtual machines". Like anemulator , SVISTA provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system; for example, irrespective of make and model of the physical network adapter, the guest machine will see anNovell /Eagle NE2000 orRealtek RTL8029(AS)network adapter . SVISTA virtualizes all devices within the virtual environment, including thevideo adapter , network adapter, andhard disk adapters. It also provides pass-through drivers for serial and parallel devices.Because all guest virtual machines use the same hardware drivers irrespective of the actual hardware on the host computer, virtual machine instances are highly portable between computers. For example, a running virtual machine can be stopped, copied to another physical computer, and started.
Implementation
Conventional emulators like
Bochs emulate the microprocessor, executing each guest CPU instruction by calling a software subroutine on the host machine that simulates the function of that CPU instruction. This level of abstraction allows the guest machine to run on host machines with a different type of microprocessor, but is also very slow.A more efficient approach consists in software
debugger technique. Some parts of the code are executed natively on the real processor; on 'bad' instructions, there are software interrupts that break execution of the guest operating system code and that particular instruction is emulated.SVISTA, as well as
VMware Workstation ,Virtual PC for Windows andQEMU with the kqemu add-on, take an even more optimized approach and run code directly when this is possible. This is the case for user mode andvirtual 8086 mode code on x86.The drawback is that the guest OS has to be compatible with the host CPU. So unlike an emulator, one cannot use SVISTA to run Mac/
PowerPC software on anIntel x86 processor. Another drawback is that it is not normally possible to efficiently nest SVISTA virtual machines. Finally, although SVISTA virtual machines run in user mode, SVISTA itself requires installing various drivers in the host operating system.Features
Besides bridging to network adapters,
CD-ROM readers and hard disk drives,SVISTA also provides the ability to simulate some hardware. For example, anISO image can be mounted as a CDROM and .hdd files can be mounted as hard disks.Issues
When using SVISTA instances in an environment where
MAC address es are used as unique identifiers (UID), it is advisable to manually configure the MAC address for each virtual machine to ensure each is actually unique. One example of such an environment is one in which MAC security is enabled on switches and another example is an environment in whichAltiris products are used (if configured to use the MAC address as the UID). If you are in such a situation, simply disable all networks/adapters other than bridged and edit each virtual machine's configuration (.2os) file and change the 'MAC address' to be unique.ee also
*
VMware
*Parallels Workstation
*User Mode Linux
*Xen (virtual machine monitor)
*Comparison of virtual machines External links
* [http://www.serenityvirtual.com/ Serenity Systems International]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.