An Introduction to Virtualization

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so very far away, the original virtualization concept sparked into existence. In fact, it was IBM with the System/360 mainframe that started the computing industry on the road to virtualization with the initial concepts of time-sharing and virtual memory. These were invented for very much the same reason that we virtualize workloads today – hardware is really expensive if it is mostly idle. If you can run your hardware environment at 80% capacity continuously, you have a very cost effective system. If it is only running at the 15%-20% capacity of many non-virtualized systems, you have the challenge of becoming more efficient in order to not require the purchase of additional capacity to solution new workloads.