Ars Technica Guide to Virtualization
In 2003, Intel announced that it was working on a technology called "Vanderpool" that was aimed at providing hardware-level support for something called "virtualization." With that announcement, the decades-old concept of virtualization had officially arrived on the technology press radar. In spite of its long history in computing, however, as a new buzzword, "virtualization" at first smelled ominously similar to terms like "trusted computing" and "convergence." In other words, many folks had a vague notion of what virtualization was, and from what they could tell it sounded like a decent enough idea, but you got the impression that nobody outside of a few vendors and CIO types was really too excited.
Fast-forward to 2008, and virtualization has gone from a solution in search of a problem, to an explosive market with an array of real implementations on offer, to a word that's often mentioned in the same sentence with terms like "shakeout" and "consolidation." But whatever the state of "virtualization" as a buzzword, virtualization as a technology is definitely here to stay.
