Recently there has been a convergence of the vision for future computing environments and it includes virtualization of the computing resources.  Similar to storage (SANs, NASs) and communication (VLANs, VPNs), this common vision has the applications and services running in virtual environments that are mapped by the system on to the available physical computing devices. This vision promises improved manageability, reliability, availability, and cost effectiveness.  The high level common vision, that storage, communication, and computing be virtualized, does not have an underlying common view of how to best achieve it.  In this talk I will describe some of the virtualization technologies that have been championed. I then focus on how hardware-level virtualization can achieve this vision and describe how hardware-level virtualization can be leveraged to further improve the computing environment.

Mendel Rosenblum is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University with research interests in systems software and computer architecture. He is also the Chief Scientist of VMware Inc., a company he co-founded in 1998 to bring virtualization technology to commodity computing hardware. He has led a number of research projects including the Disco scalable virtual machine monitor, the SimOS complete machine simulation environment, and the Hive scalable operating system. Dr. Rosenblum received a BA in Math from the University of Virginia (1984) and a MS (1989) and PhD (1992) in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley.  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.