Vmware, Inc.

Other

Xiaoxin Chen

Carl Alan Waldspurger

Pratap Subrahmanyam

Anil Rao

Alberto J Munoz

Tal Garfinkel

Sahil Rihan

Oded Horovitz

Dan Boneh

Osten Kit Colbert

Dmitriy Budko

Daniel R K Ports

Bich Cau Le

Jeffrey W Sheldon

Derek Uluski

Jagannath Gopal Krishnan

Robert D Manchester

Rajesh Venkatasubramanian

Ole Agesen

Wei Xu

Adrian Drzewiecki

John R Zedlewski

Michal Ostrowski

Wei Lun Huang

Yufeng Zheng

Ophir Rachman

Qicheng Christopher Li

Yufeng Zhang

Carl A Waldspruger

A virtual-machine-based system that identifies an application or process in a virtual machine in order to locate resources associated with the identified application. Access to the located resources is then controlled based on a context of the identified application. Those applications without the necessary context will have a different view of the resource.

Secure identification of execution contexts

Virtualization software establishes multiple execution environments within a virtual machine, wherein software modules executing in one environment cannot access private memory of another environment. A separate set of shadow memory address mappings is maintained for each execution environment. For example, a separate shadow page table may be maintained for each execution environment. The virtualization software ensures that the shadow address mappings for one execution environment do not map to the physical memory pages that contain the private code or data of another execution environment. When execution switches from one execution environment to another, the virtualization software activates the shadow address mappings for the new execution environment. A similar approach, using separate mappings, may also be used to prevent software modules in one execution environment from accessing the private disk space or other secondary storage of another execution environment.

Isolating data within a computer system using private shadow mappings

A virtual-machine-based system that may protect the privacy and integrity of application data, even in the event of a total operating system compromise. An application is presented with a normal view of its resources, but the operating system is presented with an encrypted view. This allows the operating system to carry out the complex task of managing an application's resources, without allowing it to read or modify them. Different views of 'physical' memory are presented, depending on a context performing the access. An additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains implemented by traditional operating systems and processors is provided.

Cryptographic multi-shadowing with integrity verification

Method for performing control transfers in a system with cloaked pages

A virtual-machine-based system provides a mechanism to implement application file I/O operations of protected data by implementing the I/O operations semantics in a shim layer with memory-mapped regions. The semantics of these I/O operations are emulated in a shim layer with memory-mapped regions by using a mapping between a process' address space and a file or shared memory object. Data that is protected from viewing by a guest OS running in a virtual machine may nonetheless be accessed by the process.

Transparent memory-mapped emulation of I/O calls

Virtualization software can improve the effectiveness of a guest application running inside a virtual machine (VM) by providing information to the guest application indicative of a memory condition of the VM. The memory condition is indicative of an availability of memory resources to the guest application. When guest physical memory can be reserved by a balloon application running in the (VM), providing memory condition data indicative of the memory condition provides more accurate information regarding the availability of memory resources to the guest application than could be provided by the guest operating system of the VM.

Providing memory condition information to guest applications

A computer system includes an SSD as swap space for a database management system that comprises a primary database engine and at least one clone database engine. A queued database transaction is sent to the clone database engine for pre-processing while the primary database engine is processing a current database transaction and if data needed to process the queued database transaction is not currently cached in the computer system, the clone database engine fetches the data and caches it into a buffer accessible by the primary database engine. When the primary database engine is ready to process the queued database transaction, it will be able to access the needed data without accessing the SSD, thereby avoiding delays resulting from accessing the SSD.

Efficient overcommitment of main-memory based virtual database system to disk

A method of managing host physical memory using a balloon application executing within a guest virtual machine (GVM) running on a host platform is described. The balloon application receives allocation parameters from an entity outside the GVM, the allocation parameters identifying an amount of memory for the balloon application to allocate. The balloon application adjusts the allocated amount of memory according to the allocated amount. Physical memory backing up the allocated memory can then be assigned by virtualization software for use by another virtual machine running on the host platform.

Controlling memory conditions in a virtual machine

An in-memory database management system (DBMS) in a virtual machine (VM) preserves the durability property of the ACID model for database management without significantly slowing performance due to accesses to disk. Input data relating to a database transaction is recorded into a replay log and forwarded to the VM for processing by the DBMS. An indication of a start of processing by the DBMS of the database transaction is received after receipt of the input data by the VM and an indication of completion of processing of the database transaction by the DBMS is subsequently received, upon which outgoing output data received from the VM subsequent to the receipt of the completion indication is delayed. The delayed outgoing output data is ultimately released upon a confirmation that all input data received prior to the receipt of the start indication has been successfully stored into the replay log, thereby preserving durability for the database transaction.

Synchronously logging to disk for main-memory database systems through record and replay

One embodiment of the present invention is a method of operating a virtualization system, the method including: (a) instantiating a virtualization system on an underlying hardware machine, the virtualization system exposing a virtual machine in which multiple execution contexts of a guest execute; (b) monitoring the execution contexts from the virtualization system; and (c) selectively impeding computational progress of a particular one of the execution contexts.

Impeding progress of malicious guest software

A resource scheduler for managing a distribution of host physical memory (HPM) among a plurality of virtual machines (VMs) monitors usage by each of the VMs of respective guest physical memories (GPM) to determine how much of the HPM should be allocated to each of the VMs. On determining that an amount of HPM allocated to a source VM should be reallocated to a target VM, the scheduler sends allocation parameters to a balloon application executing in the source VM causing it to reserve and write a value to a guest virtual memory (GVM) location in the source VM. The scheduler identifies the HPM location that corresponds to the reserved GVM and allocates it to the target VM by mapping a guest physical memory location of the target VM to the HPM location.

System and method for cooperative virtual machine memory scheduling

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Xiaoxin Chen