Extending Audio of Xen Virtual Machines

Abstract

Desktop virtualization introduces a novel approach in managing user environments. Going beyond the traditional thin-client based computing environment, it gives superior manage- ment with higher security, higher resource utilization, and power savings to user Desktop PCs, while providing users with new capabilities. Desktop virtualization isolates users from each other, giving each user a location independent their own customizable operating system instance, while allowing granular resource allocation and protecting users from application crashes and operating system faults caused by the activities of other users. User experience of virtualized desktop session is largely a ected by capabilities of virtu- alization environment that hides virtualization context from the end user. With a good virtualization solution, end user will never feel any di erence between virtual machine envi- ronment and normal physical machine environment. Providing this rich user experience is a hard task for virtualization system and it is harder when virtual machine is deployed in a remote server. Xen virtualization platform is designed towards enterprise level and large scale virtualization. Because of that Xen does not provides rich user experience for desktop users especially due to lack of multimedia support. In detail, if Xen virtual machine is deployed in a remote server, we can access to Xen Virtual machine's video system by vnc viewer, but it is not possible to hear audio of Xen virtual machine. "Extending Audio of Xen Virtual Machines" is a research project that tries to develop an audio system which allows accessing audio of remote Xen virtual machines by remote users. This system uses network transparent device model to create a solution. In detail, we created a special audio device that installed in Xen virtual machines that act as audio device of the virtual machine and all the audio data passes to virtual audio device captures by it and passes to remote client over the network.