Virtualizing System and Ordinary Services in Windows-based OS-Level Virtual Machines

TL;DR

This paper presents a general technique for virtualizing Windows system and ordinary services within OS-level virtual machines, addressing key challenges and demonstrating effectiveness across multiple Windows versions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to virtualize Windows services, overcoming proprietary and implementation challenges unique to Windows OS.

Findings

Successfully virtualized key Windows system services

Demonstrated effectiveness across multiple Windows versions

Reduced overhead compared to HAL-based virtualization

Abstract

OS-level virtualization incurs smaller start-up and run-time overhead than HAL-based virtualization and thus forms an important building block for developing fault-tolerant and intrusion-tolerant applications. A complete implementation of OS-level virtualization on the Windows platform requires virtualization of Windows services, such as system services like the Remote Procedure Call Server Service (RPCSS), because they are essentially extensions of the kernel. As Windows system services work very differently from their counterparts on UNIX-style OS, i.e., daemons, and many of their implementation details are proprietary, virtualizing Windows system services turned out to be the most challenging technical barrier for OS-level virtualization for the Windows platform. In this paper, we describe a general technique to virtualize Windows services, and demonstrate its effectiveness by applying it to successfully virtualize a set of important Windows system services and ordinary services on different versions of Windows OS, including RPCSS, DcomLaunch, IIS service group, Tlntsvr, MySQL, Apache2.2, CiSvc, ImapiService, etc.