Server Virtualization Platforms & Software Vendors

Various forms of partitioning and virtualization have been around since the mid 1960s when IBM started shipping the S/360 mainframe series. Later, the CP67 operating system allowed multiple users to share the hardware resources. By the mid 1970s, virtual storage was available on IBM's S/370 and Amdahl 470Vs. In the mid 1980s, Amdahl introduced MDF (Multiple Domain Facility) which allowed hardware partitioning and was followed several years later by IBM's PR/SM LPAR hypervisor and then HDS's MLPF hypervisor. These partitioning and dynamic reconfiguration facilities started showing up in UNIX platforms in the late 1990s with Sun's E10k, HP 9000s and IBM RS6000s. Intel and AMD x86 Windows platforms didn't start to implement hardware virtualization assists until 2006.

There are currently three types of server virtualization as implemented by the major vendors:

• Hardware and hypervisor based
• Software based
• Operating system based

TCOnow! for Windows Server Virtualization will help you determine the impact of Virtualization on your site requirements, server needs, network bandwidth, IT staffing, and downtime.