Virtualization is the process of creating virtual software-based computing resources from the underlying physical hardware. Virtualization creates an abstraction layer over computer hardware. It divides s single physical system into multiple virtual machines having their computing resources such as processors, memory, networks and storage. Each VM will have its own operating system (OS).
History of Virtualization
Virtualization emerged back in 1960s, when IBM launched CP-40, an experimental time-sharing operating system developed for IBM Mainframe System/360. CP-40 allowed multiple users to use the CPU using time sharing which commenced the concept of virtualization.
CP-67 was the successor of CP-40 which was a hypervisor that was released in 1068 which allowed users to run their own Operating System on IBM System/360 Model 67.
In 1998, researchers and scientists Diane Greene, Scott Devine, Mendel Rosenblum, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion founded VMware which developed modern virtualization hypervisor based on x86 architecture. This changed the way computing platforms worked across the globe by bringing in complete virtualization into computing infrastructure. Virtualization complemented Cloud Computing and both evolved together in 2000s.
Hypervisor is the software that sits on the physical server hardware and enables virtualization by allowing multiple Virtual Machines to run with it’s own Operating System on the host machine.