VM

Since the origin of computing, innovation has been happening in broadly two areas – 1) Technology – silicon, circuits, storage and so forth, aptly captured by “Moore’s law”, and 2) software – operating system, application, virtualization and the like. While these two areas continue to evolve, although at a slower pace than earlier, the last decade brought in another dimension to the innovation phenomenon –acquisition and consumption. Until the first decade of the 21st century, computing infrastructure was all captive. Companies built sprawling datacenters to house their IT infrastructure, managed by their staff – highly skilled to run operations and keep the “lights on”, if you will.

Virtualization, and the support of virtual operating systems, has been a part of IT for a very long time. The concepts are pretty simple; I/O has been much slower than main memory so actions taken by the processor have happened more quickly than actions directed at storage. This resulted in a lot of processor wait time and processor time was viewed as expensive; what could we do while we waited? Initially this lead to the creation of a number of partitions all sharing virtual storage (VS) so much so that it wasn’t unusual to find large systems running five, seven, twelve and more partitions that, in the case of IBM mainframes, broke processing down into online and batch.