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VirtualizationChanged Everything

Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Ken Hess

It is hard to think back on a time when I didn't have at least one virtual machine running somewhere. For me, it started in 1999, when I became a beta tester for a little startup company that had a single product we simply called, "VMware." VMware was cool because it allowed me to install a Windows 98SE "computer" on my Linux system. For fun, I also installed NT 4.0 and a Linux virtual machine on that same system. One day, I decided to turn them all on at once. To my surprise, they all had their own IP addresses and their own identities. I had a virtual network running on a single hunk of hardware and, to me, that was the definition of awesome.

These days that scenario sounds laughably trivial, but back then it was something very special. In fact, I looked at one of my employees and said, "Dude, this changes everything."

I wouldn't know how prophetic those words were for almost a decade.

In 2008, I went to VMworld in Las Vegas – the fifth VMworld. It was a huge celebration and a real opportunity to see how everything in computing had changed. I saw hundreds of companies whose sole purpose was to support virtualized computer technology. Some vendors sold management software. Other vendors sold virtualized desktop solutions. And, a few others sold virtual appliances. The entire show was a distinct departure from the tradeshows from a few years earlier, where vendors pushed branded hardware devices or new-fangled server hardware equipped with multiple processors, multiple gigabytes of RAM, and multiple disk configurations to power single operating systems and applications. Now, scenarios depicting a collection of hardware that hosts a single operating system border on the absurd – as absurd as my earlier assertion that virtualization changes everything.

Virtualization's absurdity reached new heights when CPU vendors eventually created processors that included virtualization extensions or what's known as

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