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Virtual Machine Disk
VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox. Initially developed by VMware for its proprietary virtual appliance products, VMDK became an open format with revision 5.0 in 2011, and is one of the disk formats used inside the Open Virtualization Format for virtual appliances. The maximum VMDK size is generally 2TB for most applications, but in September 2013, VMware vSphere 5.5 introduced 62TB VMDK capacity. Support All VMware virtualization products support VMDK; this includes VMware Workstation, VMware Workstation Player, VMware Server, VMware Fusion, VMware ESX, VMware ESXi, and all software-plus-service offerings that incorporate them. Third-party software that support VMDK include: *Parallels Desktop for Mac version 10 * QEMU *VirtualBox *former SUSE Studio *former Sun xVM (ancestor of VirtualBox) *Norton Ghost * Paragon Hard Disk Manager ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VMware
VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. VMware ESXi, its enterprise software hypervisor, is an operating system that runs on server hardware. In May 2022, Broadcom Inc. announced an agreement to acquire VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $61 billion. History Early history In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum were both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005, and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco). For the first year, VMware operated in stealth mode, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998. The compan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VMware ESXi
VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel. After version 4.1 (released in 2010), VMware renamed ESX to ''ESXi''. ESXi replaces Service Console (a rudimentary operating system) with a more closely integrated OS. ESX/ESXi is the primary component in the VMware Infrastructure software suite. The name ''ESX'' originated as an abbreviation of Elastic Sky X. In September 2004, the replacement for ESX was internally called ''VMvisor'', but later changed to ESXi (as the "i" in ESXi stood for "integrated"). Architecture ESX runs on bare metal (without running an operating system) unlike other VMware products. It includes its own kernel. In the historic VMware ESX, a Linux kernel was started first and then used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Images
A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is usually made by creating a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium, thereby perfectly replicating the structure and contents of a storage device independent of the file system. Depending on the disk image format, a disk image may span one or more computer files. The file format may be an open standard, such as the ISO image format for optical disc images, or a disk image may be unique to a particular software application. The size of a disk image can be large because it contains the contents of an entire disk. To reduce storage requirements, if an imaging utility is filesystem-aware it can omit copying unused space, and it can compress the used space. History Disk images were originally (in the late 1960s) used for backup and disk cloni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer File Formats
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. A computer system is a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation. This term may also refer to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems. Simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls are included, as are factory devices like industrial robots and computer-aided design, as well as general-purpose devices like personal computers and mobile devices like smartphones. Computers power the Internet, which links ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Disk
Virtual disk and virtual drive are software components that emulate an actual disk storage device. Virtual disks and virtual drives are common components of virtual machines in hardware virtualization, but they are also widely used for various purposes unrelated to virtualization, such as for the creation of logical disks. Operation A virtual drive is a software component that emulates an actual disk drive, such as an optical disc drive, a floppy disk drive, or a hard disk drive. To other programs, a virtual drive looks and behaves like an actual physical device. A virtual disk may be in any of the following forms: * Disk image, a computer file that contains the exact data structure of an actual storage device * Logical disk (also known as vdisk), an array of two or more actual drives that cooperatively act like a single device * RAM disk, which stores its data in random-access memory (RAM) instead of on a storage device * A mapped network drive that connects to a File Server ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copy-on-write
Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources. If a resource is duplicated but not modified, it is not necessary to create a new resource; the resource can be shared between the copy and the original. Modifications must still create a copy, hence the technique: the copy operation is deferred until the first write. By sharing resources in this way, it is possible to significantly reduce the resource consumption of unmodified copies, while adding a small overhead to resource-modifying operations. In virtual memory management Copy-on-write finds its main use in sharing the virtual memory of operating system processes, in the implementation of the fork system call. Typically, the process does not modify any memory and immediately executes a new process, replacing the address space entirely. Thus, it would be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sparse File
In computer science, a sparse file is a type of computer file that attempts to use file system space more efficiently when the file itself is partially empty. This is achieved by writing brief information (metadata) ''representing'' the empty blocks to the data storage media instead of the actual "empty" space which makes up the block, thus consuming less storage space. The full block size is written to the media as the actual size only when the block contains "real" (non-empty) data. When reading sparse files, the file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with null bytes at runtime. The application is unaware of this conversion. Most modern file systems support sparse files, including most Unix variants and NTFS. Apple's HFS+ does not provide support for sparse files, but in OS X, the virtual file system layer supports storing them in any supported file system, including HFS+. Apple File System (APFS), announced in June ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paragon Software Group
Paragon Software Group is a German software company that develops hard drive management software, low-level file system drivers and storage technologies. The Smart Handheld Device Division (SHDD) offers multilingual dictionaries, multilingual handwriting recognition, weather information, and two-way data synchronization with desktop devices. Overview The company is headquartered in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, with offices in the US, China, Japan, Poland, and Russia. The company was established in 1994 by a group of ''Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT)'' students, including founder/CEO Konstantin Komarov. A separate mobile division, called the ''Mobility Division'', was formed in 1995. The German office opened in 1998, the Swiss office in 2000. History In 2004, the company started working with Fujitsu-Siemens on its handheld PCs Russian localization. Next year, the company expanded the product line of office and gaming applications for Symbian OS and received t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ghost (disk Utility)
Ghost (an acronym for ''general hardware-oriented system transfer'') is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec. The backup and recovery functionality has been replaced by Symantec System Recovery (SSR), although the Ghost imaging technology is still actively developed and is available as part of Symantec Ghost Solution Suite. History Binary Research developed Ghost in Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India. Technologies developed by 20/20 Software were integrated into Ghost after their acquisition by Symantec in April 2000. Ghost 3.1 The first versions of Ghost supported only the cloning of entire disks. However, version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sun XVM
Sun xVM was a product line from Sun Microsystems that addressed virtualization technology on x86 platforms. One component was discontinued before the Oracle acquisition of Sun; the remaining two continue under Oracle branding. History Sun originally announced the xVM product family in October 2007. The brand at one time encompassed ''Sun xVM Server'', '' Sun xVM Ops Center'', and '' Sun xVM VirtualBox'', but the latter two products abandoned the "xVM" branding in late 2009, and are now called ''Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center'' and ''Oracle VM VirtualBox''. Products Sun xVM hypervisor The ''Sun xVM hypervisor'' was a component of Solaris based on work that was being done in the OpenSolaris Xen community. It was integrated into the OpenSolaris source base, and was available in OpenSolaris OS distributions, providing the standard features of a Xen-based hypervisor on x86-based systems. Sun xVM Server Sun xVM Server was based on the xVM hypervisor project. Sun planned to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SUSE Studio
SUSE Studio was an online Linux software creation tool by SUSE. Users could develop their own Linux distro, software appliance, or virtual appliance, mainly choosing which applications and packages they want on their "custom" Linux and how it looks. Users could choose between openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise as a base and pick from a variety of pre-configured images including jeOS, minimal server, GNOME, and KDE desktops. The SUSE Studio service was shut down on February 15, 2018. Image formats and booting options SUSE Studio supports the following image formats and booting options: * Live CD/DVD / ISO image * VMDK (VMware disk image) * VirtualBox * VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) * arddisk image * USB image * Xen * KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) * OVF ( Open Virtualization Format) * AMI ( Amazon Machine Image) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud * Preboot Execution Environment (onsite version only) SUSE Studio in use OSUSE Galleryone can find a catalog of the images creat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
QEMU
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another. Licensing QEMU was written by Fabrice Bellard and is free software, mainly licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Various parts are released under the BSD license, GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or other GPL-compatible licenses. Operating modes QEMU has multiple operating modes: ;User-mode emulation: In this mode QEMU runs single Linux or Darwin/macOS programs that were compiled for a different instruction set. System calls are thunked for endianness an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
