Understanding an Application based on the OS interaction with a Hypervisor

Question

Following I will ask a few specific questions but I will set the stage first. My goal is to monitor Applications in a very odd place - between the OS and a Hypervisor. If you have comments about this probably unachievable goal please do educate me. One good advice or link can save me days of work.

Now to my current attempt. I installed on WinXP a VirtualBox (being open-source) and got a guest OS of latest Ubuntu running within. Where should I go next? Can I set the logs to show all memory/CPU/disk instructions of the guest OS?

Thanks, Dewy

Answer 1

There is no 'real' notion of "between the OS and Hypervisor". The hypervisor itself is nothing but an optimized hardware emulation of a generic PC platform.

There's the option to configure the hypervisor to place limitations on the Guest operating system. Or, You could monitor the Memory/CPU and general performance using perfmon. Anything besides that would be the same as trying to monitor the performance of a kernel in userspace. Difficult, if not impossible.

Answer 2

In the Linux guest, I'd check out strace http://linux.die.net/man/1/strace

It does a big chunk of what you want, though not all.

The closest Windows equivalent is probably Process Monitor http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx