VMware Virtual Platform Technology

VMware Virtual Platform is a software system that allows multiple operating system environments to run concurrently on a standard x86-based PC. By adapting some new twists to virtual machine monitor technology originally employed in the 1960's, the Virtual Platform provides virtualization of the non-virtualizable Intel x86 processor. VMware Virtual Platform also handles the large diversity of hardware available for the PC. The resulting system features both high performance and high portability, as well as ease of installation.

This talk will cover some of the major challenges of implementing in software a virtual machine monitor for a commodity, x86-based PC. The talk will also describe the solutions to these problems as implemented in VMware Virtual Platform.

Mendel Rosenblum, Ph.D., is Co-founder and Chief Scientist of VMware, Inc. He is a 1992 recipient of the National Science Foundation's National Young Investigator award and a 1994 recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He was a co-winner of the 1992 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his work on log-structured file systems. Dr. Rosenblum is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the operating systems research group of the FLASH project. Together with his students, he developed the Hive scalable operating system, the SimOS complete machine simulator environment and the Disco scalable virtual machine monitor.