Introduction. For hardware used in radar systems of today, technology is evolving in an increasing rate. For existing software in radar systems, relying on specific drivers or hardware, this quickly becomes a problem. When hardware required is no longer produced or outdated, compatibility problems emerges between the new hardware and existing software. This research will focus on exploring if the virtualization technology can be helpful in solving this problem. Would it be possible to address the compatibility problem with the help of hypervisor solutions, while also maintaining high performance?

Objectives. The aim with this research is to explore the virtualization technology with focus on hypervisors, to improve the way that hardware and software cooperate within a radar system. The research will investigate if it is possible to solve compatibility problems between new hardware and already existing software, while also analysing the performance of virtual solutions compared to non-virtualized.

Methods. The proposed method is an experiment were the two hypervisors Xen and KVM will analysed. The hypervisors will be running on two different systems. A native environment with similarities to a radar system will be built and then compared with the same system, but now with hypervisor solutions applied. Research around the area of virtualization will be conducted with focus on security, hypervisor features and compatibility.

Results. The results will present a proposed virtual environment setup with the hypervisors installed. To address the compatibility issue, an old operating system has been used to prove that implemented virtualization works. Finally performance results are presented for the native environment compared against a virtual environment.

Conclusions. From results gathered with benchmarks, we can see that the individual performance might vary, which is to be expected when used on different hardware. A virtual setup has been built, including Xen and KVM hypervisors, together with NAS communication. Running an old operating system as a virtual guest, compatibility has been proven to exist between software and hardware using KVM as the virtual solution. From the results gathered, KVM seems like a good solution to investigate more.