Welcome to the govirtual.org website!  We created this site to answer the call of many who want one place to go for materials, discussions, and information about virtualization for their research and teaching.  While the site was started by the academic team at VMware, we really want this to be a non-commercial, community member site that is totally platform-agnostic.  VMware is footing the bill for the site so community members don’t need to worry about advertising, spam or any other such nonsense.  Just pure content focused on the topics you teach and research.

One of the things I hear routinely from faculty members at universities all over the globe is that they don’t have content to teach virtualization topics in their courses.  On govirtual.org, we have started a collection of virtualization course content.  Whether it is to cover a lecture or two in your operating systems course or perhaps you want to offer an entire semester on the topic – it’s in there.  We have also included the start of a recommended paper list, homework assignments and even an exam.  We know of a lot of faculty out there that use virtualization for their courses.  Security and operating systems courses are most common because of the isolation and ease of use of VMs.  Posting courses that use virtualization are just as cool as those about virtualization.  Please add your courses to this site or point it to colleagues that may have content to offer.

Another common complaint heard across the academic community is that there is no one place to find details on systems/virtualization conferences.  Govirtual.org has just the spot for this information – including valuable submission and registration date information.  Know of conferences that should be listed on the site?  Please fill out the form and let us know the details!

There are a lot of cool tools out there that support research on virtualization or that leverage virtualization.  DynamoRio is one of my favorites and VMware has decided to release it to the academic community a free download on govirtual.   Please share similar tools with the community.  You can either host them on govirtual.org or link them to the site of your choice.  Share!

We’re also hoping that folks will take advantage of the blog and discussion group feature on the site.  The site is powered by Clearspace which makes these features easy to implement and use. 

Finally, the member profile part of the site is a good way to network and get to know the community.   It’s an ideal way to find folks to collaborate with, look for internships or post-docs, or even jobs.

We are excited about the launch of govirtual.org and we are eager to see the content grow for everyone’s benefit.   VMware staff will do their best to keep the site rich, clean of promotional materials, and useful to the community, but it will be the community that will make the site a success.  Tell your students and your colleagues to check it out!