Graduate Seminar (2008 Spring) Title: The Design of VMware's
VMkernel -- An OS kernel for Managing Virtual
Machines
Christos Karamanolis, Ph.D. Senior Engineer VMware
Inc. March 14 at 3:00pm Abstract: ESX server
is VMware's data center-class virtualization
platform, now in its 3rd generation. ESX Server runs an OS kernel
specifically designed to manage virtual machines (VMs).
This OS kernel, known as the VMkernel, provides
strict resource allocation guarantees for VMs,
highly efficient I/O, and advanced reliability features. In this talk we will
describe the architecture of the VMkernel. We will
focus on its design for high-performance, reliable storage access and
describe some of its unique features for accessing VM state on SANs safely and efficiently. We will then describe how we
take advantage of those features to enable a range of solutions for VM high
availability, mobility and disaster recovery. We will conclude the talk with
a list of future directions and open issues that are interesting from a
research perspective. Bio: Christos is a senior engineer at VMware
Inc., where he works on storage systems with an emphasis on data availability
solutions. Before VMware, he was a senior
researcher and manager at HP Labs, where he led HP's
research on distributed file systems and resource management. Even earlier
than that, he was tenured faculty at
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