Introduction
It’s my pleasure to introduce the second volume of the VMware Technical Journal. As VMware CEO and throughout my career I have emphasized the importance of engagement between industry and academia as an integral part of the “golden triangle” of innovation—organic innovation within dynamic companies alongside innovative research developments with universities and the passion of start-up environments. This volume of the Journal highlights how VMware taps into this approach, with many voices coming together to demonstrate the relationship between our academic research collaboration, internship programs and organic R&D efforts.
The journal begins with perspectives shared by collaborators at Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Ohio State University. Their contributions highlight research projects supported by VMware through a combination of financial sponsorship, software donations and participation by our engineers. VMware-sponsored projects such as these span multiple focus areas, such as cluster scheduling, performance monitoring and security in cloud and virtualized environments. We continue to identify new research opportunities, and our next RFP scheduled for Spring 2013 will provide a great opportunity for a number of researchers to begin new collaborative projects.
We then feature three papers written by past interns, describing the breadth of projects undertaken by these students while at VMware. Our internship program is a highly structured opportunity for outstanding students to work on a specially defined project, which often leads to significant output such as a research publication or product enhancement. The program fosters long-term relationships, with many interns participating in multiple internships and frequently joining VMware upon graduation. Our PhD interns often integrate their summer projects into their PhD relationships, which in turn contribute to our ongoing academic partnerships—an example of the golden triangle at work!
We close this edition with contributions from a number of VMware engineers. These perspectives share how innovation occurs in R&D, whether providing a historical perspective on a key component of VMware’s development infrastructure – FrobOS – or describing a new idea for leveraging social networking to efficiently manage large datacenters. Many of our engineers act as mentors to interns and also participate in research partnerships, thus reinforcing the relationship between every aspect of innovation.
We hope you enjoy this edition as much as we’ve enjoyed the collaboration and impact highlighted in the stories we share with you here. We welcome your comments and ideas for future articles— keep the input and innovation coming!
Pat Gelsinger
CEO, VMware
Table of Contents
VMware Collaborations
VMLab: Infrastructure to Support Desktop Virtualization Experiments for Research and Education
Prasad Calyam, Alex Berryman, Albert Lai, Matthew Honigford
vQuery: A Platform for Connecting Configuration and Performance
Ilari Shafer, Snorri Gylfason, Gregory R. Ganger
Elastic Resource Allocation in Datacenters: Gremlins in the Management Plane
Mukil Kesavan, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan
VMware Intern Projects
Toward a Paravirtual vRDMA Device for VMware ESXi Guests
Adit Ranadive, Bhavesh Davda
Intrusion Detection Using VProbes
Alex Dehnert
Design and Implementation of a Cloud Tenant UI
Louis Weitzman, Alister Lewis-Bowen, Elizabeth Li, Jason Fedor
VMware Engineering
FrobOS is turning 10: What can you learn from a 10 year old?
Stuart Easson
Storage DRS: Automated Management of Storage Devices In a Virtualized Datacenter
Sachin Manpathak, Ajay Gulati, Mustafa Uysal
A Social Media Approach to Virtualization Management
Ravi Soundararajan, Emre Celebi, Lawrence Spracklen, Harish Muppalla, Vikram Makhija
VMware View® Planner: Measuring True Virtual Desktop Experience at Scale
Banit Agrawal, Rishi Bidarkar, Sunil Satnur, Tariq Magdon-Ismail, Lawrence Spracklen, Uday Kurkure, Vikram Makhija
vSOM: A Framework for Virtual Machine-centric Analysis of End-to-End Storage IO Operations
Sandeep Uttamchandani, Wenhua Liu, Samdeep Nayak
Editors
Steve Muir, Rita Tavilla
Tips
- The hardcopies of the journal and USBs loaded with the journal can be requested by sending a request to vmtj@vmware.com.
- Looking for the previous issue? VMTJ, Spring 2012 can be found here.
Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
