Mendel Rosenblum

VMware and Patent #6397242 Go Back About 10 Years

October 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Nice catch by Andrew Dugdell: it’s about 10 years ago that Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Mendel Rosenblum filed patent #6397242, “Virtualization system including a virtual machine monitor for a Computer with segmented Architecture”.

Filing date: Oct 26, 1998
Issue date: May 28, 2002
Inventors: Scott W. Devine, Edouard Bugnion, Mendel Rosenblum
Assignees: VMWare, Inc.
Primary Examiner: Majid Banankhah
Attorney: Jeffrey Slusher
Application number: 9/179,137

Abstract
In a computer that has hardware processor, and a memory, the invention provides a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and a virtual machine (VM) that has at least one virtual processor and is operatively connected to the VMM for running a sequence of VM instructions, which are either directly executable or non-directly executable. The VMM includes both a binary translation sub-system and a direct execution sub-system, as well as a sub-system that determines if VM instructions must be executed using binary translation, or if they can be executed using direct execution. Shadow descriptor tables in the VMM, corresponding to VM descriptor tables, segment tracking and memory tracing are used as factors in the decision of which execution mode to activate. The invention is particularly well-adapted for virtualizing computers in which the hardware processor has an Intel x86 architecture.

Stand By Your Woman: Mendel Rosenblum Leaves VMware Too

September 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Reporting on the recent removal of Diane Greene as president, CEO and board member of VMware, we wrote:

“We’re wondering how the VMware troops will react on the news, and what will happen with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist at VMware and Greene’s husband.”

Now IHT / The New York Times has received confirmation that Rosenblum, co-founder and top executive at the company as well as husband to Greene, has resigned from his position (hat tip to Tarry). He announced his resignation and return to Stanford as a full-time professor in a companywide message on Monday night.

The NY Times also offers some insight about the removal of Greene:

On July 7, she found out just how cold it had become. After Greene made a special presentation to VMware’s board, Tucci, who heads VMware’s parent company, EMC, pulled her aside, according to people familiar with the events, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company decisions.

Inviting Mendel Rosenblum, Greene’s husband and the co-founder of VMware, into the room, Tucci told Greene she was fired, effective immediately. And he said the board wanted Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist, to take her seat on the board. Rosenblum declined the offer.

The news comes after the surprising move of Richard Sarwal, former executive VP of research and development at VMware, who returned to Oracle after a brief stint at the company. Another executive to jump ship is Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development at VMware until recently.

Who’s next?

We’ll update the post should new information come to light.

Get A 10% Discount For Structure 08, And Start Putting Cloud Computing To Work

June 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

In about 3 weeks, one of the world’s most popular tech blogs, GigaOm, is hosting what is likely to become one of the must-attend events in the storage, hosting, cloud computing and virtualization industry for this year.

The conference is dubbed Structure 08, and features a slew of kick-ass speakers like Werner Vogels (VP & CTO Amazon), James Crowe (President and CEO Level 3), Mendel Rosemblum (Co-founder VMware), Albert Esser (VP, Data Center Infrastructure, Dell), Greg Papadopulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems and many others.

The event takes place on June 25 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.

Tickets are selling out quickly, so sign up fast! As one of Structure 08’s media partners, we can offer our readers a 10 % discount on the registration fee. Simply click the event logo above and the discount will automatically calculated.

We’ll attend the event ourselves, so expect lots of reports and video interviews!

If you’ll be there too, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to hook up.

Today the future of Virtualization was demoed by VMWare

September 13, 2007 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Over the last few years virtualization became a mainstream tool for IT administrators looking to consolidate applications within a data center and continues to be adopted as companies expand the technology to plan for business continuity and create high-availability servers.
At the same time virtualization becomes more available in desktops and mobile devices, where the increased flexibility allows businesses and consumers to reduce costs and increase security.

At VMware’s conference in San Francisco today, their chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum demoed an impressive step ahead in raising the high-availability capabilities of Virtualization technology.

Rosenblum saw the future of Virtualization and named it continuous high availability

He demonstrated two servers running Microsoft Exchange Server being replicated in real time from one virtualization host to another. The primary server on stage that was running the equivalent of 50 users pounding on Microsoft Outlook. The server’s ongoing activity was being mirrored on a secondary server, which was receiving a live stream of events as they were entered into the log of the virtual machine on the first server.

Through a new twist on VMware’s management software, Virtual Infrastructure 3, he unplugged the primary machine, and the second detected a failure and shifted handling the users to the secondary server. Since this secondary server was already receiving a stream of log events, it could pick up at the precise point where the other had left off. The pause between one virtual machine stopping and the secondary server’s virtual machine starting appeared to be about a second. This is basically extending to memory and input devices interaction what is applied to storage data with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions well-known in the security industry. Read the above twice and show of your knowledge of the latest acronym to your tech-savvy friends and explain what CHA or “continuous high availability” stands for in Virtualized environments.

“Ultimately, virtualization will bring about a vision that server makers years ago presented–a dynamically adjusting, self-managing data center…since this approach works not for a few select applications but for anything that runs in a VMware virtual machine! By adopting an approach in between streaming and software-as-a-service, the application starts to run after about 10% of the download occurs, making virtualized applications more palatable to end users…What we’re effectively doing is taking things that were statically assigned in the past and turning them over to a piece of software that makes decisions about how to schedule it. We’re moving toward this idea of a data center that really manages the hardware itself.” Rosenblum added.
Although this much applauded technology is far from being shipped to their customers, VMware seems to have set another milestone in the Virtualization history.
Detailed reports of his keynote are written by the editors Stephen Shankland, Charles Babcock and industry blogger Alessandro Perilli .