VMware launches GoVirtual.org for the academic community

As a technology, virtualization is said to still be in its infancy even though virtualization stretches back to the late 1950s and 60s and x86 virtualization dates back to 1998. But it has only been in the last few years that the technology has been fully embraced by the IT world.

However, virtualization has always found a friend in the academic community. And support in that community has grown. VMware’s Academic Program has quadrupled in the last 12 months. The program has given 1,350 computer science, engineering, and information systems academic departments in 54 countries open access to resources, research, and VMware’s virtual infrastructure technology.

To answer academia’s growing need for virtualization information, VMware has created yet another community portal called GoVirtual.org.

According to VMware, the new community site is intended to provide research and instruction on virtualization-related topics by enabling the sharing of ideas, results, materials, and tools among its members. The site is described as a comprehensive resource and knowledge base where members of academia can go to find the latest research and interact with leading researchers.

GoVirtual.org is on its way to becoming a great source of virtualization information. The community supports blogs and discussion forums for members to communicate with each other. It also provides a list of academic- and research-oriented virtualization conferences. To help educators and students with their virtualization research projects, the site includes a download section with source code and software tools. And it also includes a collection of several technical papers as well as freely available courseware. The 25 free courses currently being made available include concepts such as the basics of virtualization, interpretation and binary translation, I/O architectures of virtualization, and binary optimization.

Universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL), Georgia Tech, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and University of California at Berkeley are already benefiting from the VMware Academic Program.

“GoVirtual.org is a much-needed resource given the rapid growth of the VMware Academic Program and the academic community’s high interest in virtualization and VMware products,” said Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO at VMware. “I invite educators and students to use the site as a forum to exchange ideas, papers, and courseware; to discuss new ways to use virtualization in the classroom and labs; and to brainstorm ground-breaking research ideas to make virtualization even more useful and impactful for datacenter and desktop management.”

The site is supposed to be open to all virtualization platforms, technologies, and features. So it will be interesting to see if Microsoft, Citrix, and others take part in the VMware-owned and controlled community. And it will be interesting to see just how open VMware makes the site. VMware’s virtualization trade show, VMworld, is supposed to be open to all virtualization technology as well, but it is still owned, controlled, and dominated by VMware. As this is an academic site, hopefully it can remain impartial.