VMware has created a new community site specifically for virtualization researchers and academics, dubbed GoVirtual.org. The website contains technical papers, courseware, software, and other tools needed to facilitate global knowledge-sharing around the topic of virtualization.
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.
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 said to be already benefiting from the VMware Academic Program.