Steve Vinoski's Blog

IEEE Internet Computing is soliciting papers for a special issue on Virtualization.

Final submissions due: 1 July 2012
Publication date: March/April 2013

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 15 June 2012.

One of the most famous adages in computer science is that “any problem in computer science can be solved by an extra level of indirection.” Increasingly, that level of indirection takes the form of virtualization, where a resource’s consumers are provided with a virtual rather than physical version of that resource. This layer of indirection has helped address a multitude of problems, including efficiency, security, high availability, elasticity, fault containment, mobility, and scalability.

In the past several years virtualization has gone mainstream, and more and more resources are virtualizable. Although virtual machines are the most obvious example, others include desktop sharing (VNC), virtual networks, virtual storage, and many more. All these have an enormous impact on Internet computing. A key recent use of virtualization is to enable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. Virtualization lets producers efficiently support many tenants while strongly isolating them from each other, and consumers to be isolated from the specifics of providers’ physical capacity, allowing, for example, virtual machines to move between different computers and even clouds. This special issue seeks articles from both industry and academia that discuss the application and development of virtualization in the Internet computing space. Topics include:

• cloud computing;
• virtual networks;
• storage-area networks;
• remote desktops;
• security;
• performance (in a network context); and
• migration of virtual environments.

Editors’ note: We encourage submissions from both academic and industrial practitioners, especially as they pertain to open source tools or products, but content must have technical merit, not be an advertisement.

Questions? Contact Guest Editors Fred Douglis and Orran Krieger.

All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words, focused on Internet technologies and implementations. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IC’s international readership—primarily system and software design engineers. We do not accept white papers, and we discourage strictly theoretical or mathematical papers. To submit a manuscript, please log on to ScholarOne to create or access an account, which you can use to log on to IC’s Author Center and upload your submission.