Ars Technica Guide to Virtualization Part I

Short Description
In 2003, Intel announced that they were working on a technology called “Vanderpool” that was aimed at providing hardware-level support for a something called “virtualization.” With that announcement, the decades-old concept of virtualization had officially arrived on the technology press radar. But in spite of its long history in computing, 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 it 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.

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Content
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 say. Virtualization implementations are so widespread that some are even popular in the consumer market, and some (the really popular ones) even involve gaming. Anyone who uses an emulator like MAME uses virtualization, as does anyone who uses either the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3. From the server closet to the living room, virtualization is subtly but radically changing the relationship between software applications and hardware.
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Abstraction, and the big shifts in computing
Most of the biggest tectonic shifts in computing have been fundamentally about remixing the relationship between hardware and software by inserting a new abstraction layer in between programmers and the processor. The first of these shifts was the instruction set architecture (ISA) revolution, which was kicked off by IBM’s invention of the microcode engine. By putting a stable interface—the programming model and the instruction set—in between the programmer and the hardware, IBM and its imitators were able to cut down on software development costs by letting programmers reuse binary code from previous generations of a product, an idea that was novel at the time.
Another major shift in computing came with the introduction of the reduced instruction set computing (RISC) concept, a concept that put compilers and high-level languages in between programmers and the ISA, leading to better performance.
Virtualization is the latest in this progression of moving software further away from hardware, and this time, the benefits have less to do with reducing development costs and increasing raw performance than they do with reducing infrastructure costs by allowing software to take better advantage of existing hardware.
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