Abstract

Virtual machines were developed by IBM in the 1960’s to provide concurrent, interactive access to a mainframe computer. Each virtual machine is a replica of the underlying physical machine and users are given the illusion of running directly on the physical machine. Virtual machines also provide benefits like isolation and resource sharing, and the ability to run multiple flavors and configurations of operating systems. VMware Workstation brings such mainframe-class virtual machine technology to PC-based desktop and workstation computers. This paper focuses on VMware Workstation’s approach to virtualizing I/O devices.

Authors

Beng-Hong Lim, Jeremy Sugerman, Ganesh Venkitachalam