Patent ID: 7917811

Claim:
A virtual machine system in which a plurality of virtual machines operate on a real machine comprising a physical processor, a physical memory, and an actual device under control of a virtual machine controller, the virtual machine system comprising: a dedicated actual device operated only by one user virtual machine: a shared actual device commonly operated by a plurality of user virtual machines allocated with said physical processor, physical memory, with the shared actual device being divided via a control virtual machine; and a virtual device not including the actual device, the virtual device being controlled by the virtual machine controller, wherein each of the user virtual machines and the control virtual machine include a fault monitor that monitors a device failure of the dedicated actual device and the shared actual device, wherein the virtual machine controller holds device configuration information of a device type that is allocated to each of the virtual machines, and wherein each of the fault monitors notifies a system administrator of a device failure in accordance with the device configuration information corresponding to trouble information at the time of device failure detection, wherein each of the fault monitors includes a means for reading device configuration information which the virtual machine controller holds, and reads the device configuration information on start-up or at a time of device configuration change, wherein the device configuration information contains an identification flag indicating whether a virtual machine currently operating is a user virtual machine or a control virtual machine, wherein the device type indicates whether a device allocated to a virtual machine is the dedicated actual device or the shared actual device, wherein the device type of the device configuration information contains information indicative of a virtual device, and wherein the fault monitor determines based on the information whether or not a device, in which a failure has occurred, is a virtual device, and when it is a failure of the virtual device, the fault monitor notifies this to a system administrator of the virtual machine system not as a failure of an actual device but as a failure of the virtual machine controller.