This talk will cover the architecture of ESX server, VMware's data center-class virtualization product. The main focus of the talk will be on the architecture of the storage stack in ESX's proprietary kernel. I will motivate the need for encapsulating virtual machine (VM) state in special containers that are safely shared on Storage Area Networks and explain how we achieve that in ESX. I will then describe how we take advantage of those properties of VM storage to enable a range of solutions for VM high availability, mobility and disaster recovery. I will conclude the talk with a list of future directions and open issues that are interesting from a research perspective.
Christos Karamanolis is a senior engineer at VMware where he leads the R&D team that develops VMware's data protection products. In addition to product development, he is the closest thing VMware has to a storage systems researcher. Before being involved in product development, he was a researcher at HP Labs, where he led HP's research efforts in the space of distributed file systems and storage QoS. He holds a PhD on Distributed Computing from Imperial College (where he also taught for a few years and was offered a tenured lectureship) and a Diploma on Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. He has had more than 20 papers published in refereed journals and conferences and he holds 7 US patents. He is active in the research community by participating in conference program committees and by collaborating in research projects with universities such as CMU, Duke and UC Santa Cruz.
For more details, see http://www.karamanolis.org/christos/index.html.
