Following the rapid and highly successful introduction of
hardware virtualisation in server systems, virtualisation is now
gaining ground in control components and embedded systems to an
ever increasing extent. Likewise, multicore processor
architectures initially conquered server systems, however, they
soon moved on to the desktop and are now establishing themselves
in embedded systems. It all began with the battle for
availability percentages. The original aim of virtualisation was
to provide a method of enabling the rapid replacement of
inadequate or defective server hardware. An important landmark
was the server availability of 99.99 percent, corresponding to a
maximum downtime of 52 minutes a year. Nevertheless, it is not
possible to fully reinstall a complete system in this time
frame. Virtualisation, however, requires only a minimum server
environment (host system) to be set up, as the processor
actually deployed (guest system) can continue to be used
independent of the hardware. Single hardware – many