Virtualization for Newbies: Origins of Virtualization

October 17, 2013 Steve Baca Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

The origins of virtualization began with a paper that Professor Christopher Strachey presented on time-shared computers at the UNESCO International Conference on Information Processing in June 1959. Time-sharing was a new idea, and Professor Strachey was the first to publish on the topic that would lead to virtualization. After the conference, new research was done, and several more research papers written on the topic of time-sharing began to appear. These research papers energized a small group of programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to begin to develop a Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). From these first time-sharing systems attempts, virtualization was pioneered in the early 1960s by IBM, General Electric, and other companies attempting to solve several problems.

Virtualization for Newbies: Five Types of Virtualization

October 3, 2013 Steve Baca Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Although some form of virtualization has been around since the mid-1960s, it has evolved over time, while remaining close to its roots. Much of the evolution in virtualization has occurred in just the last few years, with new types being developed and commercialized. For our purposes, the different types of virtualization are limited to Desktop Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, and Network Virtualization.

Virtualization for Newbies: Top Four Reasons to Go Virtual

September 19, 2013 Steve Baca Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

In general, the idea behind virtualization is to make many from one. As an example, from one physical server using virtualization software, multiple virtual machines can run as if each virtual machine were a separate physical box. In data centers, before virtualization, one or more applications and an operating system would run on their own unique physical server. Since each one of those physical servers needed floor or rack space, there was a problem of the growing size and number of data centers that businesses needed in IT. As more and more physical servers were added to run the ever growing number of virtual machines, this led to “data center sprawl.” Using virtualization to consolidate the number of physical servers reversed the trend of data center sprawl, and companies began to see a cost savings.