The World of Virtualization

I've been involved in virtualization for a long time.   Mainframe guys laugh at the distributed world with virtualization.  "We've been doing virtualization before you were born," commented one "veteran" of the war.  LPAR's are common stuff in IBM world but for Windows, Linux, and desktop guys the technology is only a few years old.  

The first time I saw x86 virtualization was around 2001 when a vendor from Connectix showed me an early version of Virtual PC.  I was amazed.  He kept discussing how much better and cheaper it was then VMWare, but I didn't care.  Here was a way to run DOS and 16-bit Windows apps that accessed hardware directly in a protected mode world.  For what ever reason we got attached to server sprawl during the early to mid 2000's.  Only when we realized that we were burning up data centers and had subpar delivery did we finally wake up.

Along comes VMWare ESX, with its fancy Hypervisor.   Now the game changed.  That along with multi-core and reliable fibre channel SAN's make virtualization in Windows a slam dunk.  Big time reductions in costs and increased reliability make this a no brainer.  The bigger question is where do we go from here.  Stay tuned for my crystal ball.......