FIG. 19 illustrates an embodiment of initializing a multi-server system. A two-node software defined server containing node_0 (1902) and node_1 (1904) is shown in this example. In this example, at boot time/initialization, all guest physical addresses are marked as dormant. Further, all guest physical addresses are owned by a single node of the system, node_0 in this example (in some embodiments, all guest resources, such as VCPUs are also initially located on the same, single node at start up). As shown in this example, the definition of the guest physical addresses on node_0 and the indication of dormancy of the guest physical addresses are implemented using an internal page table 1906 (e.g., a second level page table or other data structure managing and tracking placement of pages). As one example implementation, the page table includes metadata information for guest physical addresses. The metadata includes a dormant bit, which is set if the page is dormant.
Since all of the guest physical addresses are dormant, they are not mapped to any real physical memory, and thus may be owned by a single node, even though if they were expanded (i.e., mapped to real physical memory), the node could not contain all of the physical memory. This provides a convenient and efficient initialization state, because a large amount of real physical memory is not required to boot the guest operating system—that is, even though the guest system is virtually large, its physical footprint is small, which allows for fast booting of the system.
