Duplication of Windows Services

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic methodology for duplicating Windows system and ordinary services at the OS level, enabling virtualization of Windows services crucial for cloud computing and HPC applications.

Contribution

It introduces the first known systematic approach to duplicate Windows services, addressing proprietary implementation challenges and enabling OS-level virtualization for Windows.

Findings

Successfully duplicated services on different Windows versions

Identified key issues affecting service duplication

Methodology applicable to core Windows services

Abstract

OS-level virtualization techniques virtualize system resources at the system call interface, has the distinct advantage of smaller run-time resource requirements as compared to HAL-level virtualization techniques, and thus forms an important building block for virtualizing parallel and distributed applications such as a HPC clusters. Because the Windows operating system puts certain critical functionalities in privileged user-level system service processes, a complete OS-level virtualization solution for the Windows platform requires duplication of such Windows service as Remote Procedure Call Server Service (RPCSS). As many implementation details of the Windows system services are proprietary, duplicating Windows system services becomes the key technical challenge for virtualizing the Windows platform at the OS level. Moreover, as a core component of cloud computing, IIS web server-related services need to be duplicated in containers (i.e., OS-level virtual machines), but so far there is no such scheme. In this paper, we thoroughly identify all issues that affect service duplication, and then propose the first known methodology to systematically duplicate both system and ordinary Windows services. Our experiments show that the methodology can duplicate a set of system and ordinary services on different versions of Windows OS.