Fifty years of evolution in virtualization technologies: from the first IBM machines to modern hyperconverged infrastructures

The evolution of virtualization is an exciting history of enabling technologies that have offered the ability to organize and utilize the hardware resources more efficiently. We will start from the origins of the first IBM machines back in 1960's, where the notion of virtualization was originally introduced to partition the hardware resources more efficiently. This was well before the onset of the majority of the operating systems in the early 1970's, which were initially introduced as a software alternative to partition and expose hardware resources to multiple users. In the late 1980's and 1990's the software hypervisors allowed the multiplexing of PC hardware and enabled the use of virtual machines, which in the 2000's became a commodity that needed to be efficiently orchestrated and provisioned in bulk. The IaaS cloud era had arrived, bringing more interesting challenges for the dynamic, thin provisioning of hardware and software resources to applications. Nowadays, we are living in the times of "software defined everything". We have hyper-convergence in all our datacenter infrastructures, where all compute, network and storage resources are controlled by software. The talk will present this exciting long technology journey that started more than 50 years ago and still continues, always driven by the notion of virtualizing expensive hardware resources to multiple users.