Architecture and Virtualization Course

Lesson 1 • Instruction Sets and Privilege Levels

Defines ISA concepts and CPU privilege rings that underpin hypervisor design. Students gain the vocabulary needed to analyse virtualisation traps and emulation.

Lesson 2 • I/O Subsystems and Bus Architecture

Explains how devices communicate with the CPU through buses and controllers. Provides the hardware context for understanding device virtualisation and passthrough.

Lesson 3 • Multicore and NUMA Architectures

Introduces multicore design and Non-Uniform Memory Access topology. Prepares students to configure virtual machine CPU and memory affinity correctly.

Lesson 4 • CPU Structure and Operation

Covers the internal organisation of a processor, including ALU, control unit, and registers. Establishes the hardware baseline required for all subsequent virtualisation concepts.

Lesson 1 • Kernel Architecture and System Calls

Covers monolithic, microkernel, and hybrid designs and how user processes request services. Establishes the OS layer that hypervisors must manage or emulate.

Lesson 2 • Process and Thread Management

Explains scheduling, process states, and thread models used by modern OSes. Directly informs how virtual CPUs are scheduled on physical cores.

Lesson 3 • Networking Stack Internals

Traces packet flow through the OS network stack from socket to NIC. Prepares students to understand virtual switches and network virtualisation overlays.

Lesson 4 • File Systems and Storage Abstractions

Surveys file system structures, journaling, and block device interfaces. Connects to virtual disk formats and storage I/O paths in virtualised environments.

Lesson 1 • Defining Virtualisation and Its Goals

Introduces the formal definition of a virtual machine and the three Popek-Goldberg properties. Sets the theoretical framework used throughout the course.

Lesson 2 • OS-Level and Application Virtualisation

Introduces container-based and application-level isolation as lighter-weight alternatives. Positions these approaches relative to full VM virtualisation for workload selection.

Lesson 3 • Hardware-Assisted Virtualisation

Details CPU extensions that add a new privilege level below the OS for the VMM. Explains how these extensions resolve the x86 virtualisation problem efficiently.

Lesson 4 • Full Virtualisation and Trap-and-Emulate

Explains how a hypervisor intercepts privileged instructions without guest OS modification. Students understand the performance cost and correctness guarantees of this approach.

Lesson 1 • Virtual CPU Scheduling

Examines how hypervisors multiplex physical CPUs among virtual CPUs across multiple VMs. Students can identify scheduling policies that minimise latency and maximise throughput.

Lesson 2 • Hypervisor Security Architecture

Analyses the hypervisor attack surface, VM escape risks, and mitigation strategies. Establishes security principles applied in later chapters on hardening and compliance.

Lesson 3 • Type 1 vs. Type 2 Hypervisor Models

Compares bare-metal and hosted hypervisor architectures across performance, security, and deployment dimensions. Anchors all subsequent hypervisor implementation discussions.

Lesson 4 • Memory Virtualisation Techniques

Covers shadow page tables, extended page tables, and memory ballooning used by hypervisors. Connects OS paging knowledge to the two-level address translation problem.

Lesson 1 • Network Security in Virtual Environments

Examines micro-segmentation, distributed firewalls, and east-west traffic inspection. Applies security principles from the hypervisor chapter to the network layer.

Lesson 2 • Overlay Network Protocols

Explains VXLAN, GENEVE, and GRE encapsulation for extending Layer 2 over Layer 3 fabrics. Enables students to design multi-tenant networks across physical boundaries.

Lesson 3 • Network Function Virtualisation

Covers replacing physical appliances with software-based network functions on commodity hardware. Connects SDN concepts to service chaining and lifecycle management of virtual functions.

Lesson 4 • SDN Control Plane Architecture

Introduces the separation of control and data planes and the role of SDN controllers. Students understand how centralised policy drives distributed forwarding in virtual networks.

Lesson 1 • Network-Attached Storage and Shared File Systems

Covers NFS and SMB protocols used to share VM image repositories across hosts. Connects to live migration requirements introduced in the next section.

Lesson 2 • Storage Area Networks and iSCSI

Explains block-level storage protocols used to present shared storage to hypervisor hosts. Enables students to configure and troubleshoot SAN connectivity for VM datastores.

Lesson 3 • Virtual Disk Formats and Provisioning

Compares raw, QCOW2, VMDK, and VHD formats across performance and feature dimensions. Directly applies file system knowledge to virtual disk selection and management.

Lesson 4 • Storage Performance and QoS

Examines IOPS, throughput, and latency metrics and how QoS policies enforce storage SLAs. Enables students to prevent noisy-neighbour storage contention in multi-VM environments.

Lesson 1 • VM Provisioning and Templating

Covers golden image creation, template management, and rapid VM cloning techniques. Establishes the provisioning foundation for automation pipelines built in later sections.

Lesson 2 • Infrastructure as Code for VMs

Introduces declarative configuration tools for defining and deploying VM infrastructure. Enables students to version-control and reproduce entire virtual environments reliably.

Lesson 3 • Live Migration and High Availability

Explains the mechanics of live VM migration and cluster-level HA restart policies. Requires shared storage knowledge from the previous chapter to understand migration prerequisites.

Lesson 4 • Resource Scheduling and DRS

Examines dynamic resource scheduling algorithms that balance VM workloads across host clusters. Applies vCPU and memory virtualisation knowledge to cluster-level optimisation.

Lesson 1 • Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning

Introduces telemetry collection, baseline profiling, and capacity forecasting for virtual infrastructure. Applies all prior performance concepts to proactive infrastructure management.

Lesson 2 • Hybrid Cloud and Workload Portability

Covers VM image portability standards, cloud bursting, and consistent networking across environments. Enables students to design workloads that move seamlessly between on-premises and cloud.

Lesson 3 • GPU and Accelerator Virtualisation

Covers vGPU partitioning, GPU passthrough, and MIG for sharing accelerators among VMs. Addresses AI and HPC workloads that require hardware acceleration in virtual environments.

Lesson 4 • Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Designs VM-based disaster recovery architectures using replication and automated failover. Integrates snapshot, HA, and networking knowledge into end-to-end continuity planning.