Patent ID: 8032899

Claim:
A method of providing policy-based operating system services in a hypervisor on a computing system, the computing system comprising at least one compute node, the compute node comprising an operating system and a hypervisor, the operating system comprising a kernel, the hypervisor comprising a kernel proxy and a plurality of operating system services of a service type, wherein the computing system is a distributed computing system further comprising one or more operating system service nodes, wherein one or more of the operating system services are distributed among the operating system service nodes, the method comprising: establishing, on the compute node, a kernel policy specifying one of the operating system services of the service type for use by the kernel proxy in the hypervisor, wherein the kernel policy also specifies an operating system service node that is to provide the specified operating system service; and accessing, by the kernel proxy, the specified operating system service, including accessing, by the kernel proxy of the compute node, the specified operating system service of the operating system service node.