Research at VMware

Abstract

VMware has its roots in the academic research community, starting with the commercialization of the work on x86 virtualization of Prof. Mendel Rosenblum and his team at Stanford University [1]. Developers embraced VMware's original workstation product and the ensuing work on server virtualization led to today's vSphere platform, which has enabled significant server consolidation, numerous operational benefits, and isolation-based security. In addition, the vast improvements in server utilization provide VMware's customers with significant cost savings and is a key contributor to the environmental sustainability of modern data centers [2]. VMware has remained true to its research roots, with a strong engineering culture that emphasizes grassroots innovation through hackathons, incubation projects, open source activities, seminars and RADIO, an annual R&D innovation offsite that brings together a substantial fraction of the company's developers. Just a few examples of current activities are open vSwitch (OVS), the virtualization and exploration of non-volatile memory (NVM), securing and managing the Internet of Things (IoT), and support for Containers. Over time, there has been a dramatic increase in the scope for innovation at VMware. This paper provides an overview of how that scope has grown and how it has expanded the range of relevant research opportunities along with a description of VMware's recently formed research group, including its mission, composition and significant research thrusts.