Abstract:
n recent years, virtualization has become an es-
sential technology for modern enterprise and academic comput-
ing. Virtualization uncouples software from hardware, enabling
workload consolidation, disaster recovery, scalable test labs, and
affordable deployment in the cloud perspective. Hypervisors
create and manage virtual machines while establishing isolation,
sharing resources evenly while supporting guest environments
with different requirements. While students learn the theory
behind virtualization, memory management, and scheduling, they
do not have valuable opportunities to experience, visualize, and
experiment with those concepts in a real and/or meaningful
way. The gap between the abstract model and system-level
behavior results in significant missed learning opportunities for
computer scientists and engineers in training. This project seeks
to remedy this gap with a novel, web-based hypervisor simulation
with a visual interface. Our program enables stronger utility
of hypervisor and operating system knowledge through the
use of interactive dashboards, visualization of dynamic system
resources, algorithmic step-throughs and ephemeral memory
and CPU simulation. The simulator gives users the ability to
customize and define scheduling and memory allocation strategies
thus providing a real-world, logical context to learning with
a practical application for students, teachers and hobbyists
alike. User experimentation and feedback illustrates notable
improvements in understanding, engagement, and preparedness
for complex concepts dealing with virtualization.
Index Terms—Virtualization, Hypervisor, Virtual Machine,
Operating System Simulator, Teaching Tool, Cloud Computing,
Memory Allocation, CPU Scheduling, Context Switching, Real
Time Visualization, Interactive Dashboard, Educational Tech-
nology, Web-based Platform, Simulation Algorithms, Resource
Management, VM Isolation, Dynamic Workload, User Experi-
mentation, Engagement, Modern UI
