These past few years have been consistently celebrated as a coming of age party for quite a few technologies, one such being Virtualization.
One of the favorite tome of both vendors and CIOs, this technology having been around since the 1960’s, was never in the spotlight as it is now. It was resigned to being appreciated by the geeks that got a kick out of playing around with the internals of their machines, and unleashing their creativity to create an entire new wave of products and processes to further juice out hardware.
Few will know that VMware, a virtual machine monitor was created at Sanford University, incorporated as a company in 1998 and acquired by EMC in 2004, has been often heralded as the vanguard of this domain.
In the year 2000, an article published in our sister publication, namely
Dr. Dobbs Journal or DDJ as it’s popularly known had Jason Nieh and Ozgur Can Leonard talk about the benefits of using VMware to teach students at Columbia University kernel development virtually. A class of over 140 students was taught operating systems with kernel level projects by harnessing the benefit of virtualization on an equipment mix of 333-MHz Intel Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM, and 266-MHz AMD K6 with 64 MB of RAM. These had a 4 GB hard disk and ran Red Hat Linux 6.0 with the X Window system.
Most companies have cut spending and are looking at ways and means to generate cash flow which will ensure that their existence is assured at least till the next quarter. Purchasing new hardware could be put off for a later day and virtualization solutions could be deployed to maximize computing power. Right from platform virtualization to encapsulation to I/O virtualization can be used by the nimble footed CIO to ensure that productivity need not come with an expensive tag and computing hardware no matter how old can always be counted on to save the day.