Understanding the Importance of Virtualization

This is where the two stories come together. There was a wild explosion of data centers overfilled with servers; but as time passed, in a combination of the effect of Moore’s Law and the “one server, one application” model, those servers did less and less work. Fortunately, help was on the way in the form of virtualization. The idea and execution of virtualization was not new. It ran on IBM mainframes back in the early 1970s but was updated for modern computer systems. We’ll come back to the specifics of virtualization in a moment, but in keeping with Popek and Goldberg’s definition, virtualization allows many operating systems to run on the same server hardware at the same time, while keeping each ...

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