Computer History revisited - Virtualisation

I must be old enough to have seen the full circle in lots of technology. I remember when Operation Systems were proprietary and this thing called Unix came along. The OS became "proprietary" when this thing called Linux came along. In each case as we entered the new paradigm, the operating system was not that good compared to the proprietary ones and we have to wait these days for features to be added to the various Linux distributions that have been in "Unix" versions for ages.

So lets talk about Virtualisation. The saviour in Green Computing. IBM in the 1960s ran Virtual Machines in it's operating software with things such as TSO and CICS around the place and running on the same hardware.

Today we have VMWare for example. In essence, it allows a single computer to run a number of instances of the same or different operating systems. So you could have a computer running RedHat, Suse, Windows XP, Vista for example and be able to log into each of these "machines" and run applications that are best suited to that operating system.

Before this, if you needed a Windows machines and a Linux machine you had to have two different computers. This meant more electricity and cost.

Of course the computer being used to host the virtual machines must have sufficient CPU and Memory and disk space but surveys have shown that a lot of computers are not fully utilised. With VM you now up your utilisation of an expensive resource.

There are downsides. For example the physical ports on the computer, the USB or serial ports, sometimes have contention problems between the different virtual machines. This has been mostly worked out and is not really an issue anymore.

theBizWiz

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