Founded by UVA alumni
The virtualization software underneath the modern data center.
A Stanford professor with a UVA mathematics degree worked out how to make one computer behave convincingly like many — and rebuilt how the world runs servers.
How it started: Mendel Rosenblum ’84
Mendel RosenblumCollege 1984 · co-founder, chief scientist
Mendel Rosenblum took his mathematics degree here in 1984, then a doctorate at Berkeley, and became a professor of computer science at Stanford working on operating systems. Virtualization was an old idea from mainframes that everyone assumed could not be made to work on ordinary x86 hardware, because the instruction set was not designed to permit it.
His group worked out how. In 1998 he co-founded VMware with Diane Greene, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion, and served as its chief scientist for the company’s first decade.
How it changed the world
Before virtualization, a server ran one workload and sat mostly idle. After it, one machine ran many, and a running computer became something you could pause, copy and move. Every cloud provider is built on that premise. It is not an exaggeration to say the industry that followed was only economically possible because of it.
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