In computing,

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

is the use of a computer to simulate another computer. The following is a chronological list of virtualization technologies.

Timeline

Note: This timeline is missing data for important historical systems, including: Atlas Computer (Manchester), GE 645, Burroughs B5000.

1960s

In the mid-1960s,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's Cambridge Scientific Center develops CP-40, the first version of CP/CMS. Experience on the CP-40 project provides input to the development of the

IBM System/360 Model 67 IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM' ...

, announced in 1965. CP-40 is re-implemented for the S/360-67 as CP-67, and by April 1967, both versions are in daily production use. ;1964 *

Cambridge Scientific Center begins development of CP-40. ;1965 *IBM M44/44X, an experimental paging operating system, is in use at Thomas J. Watson Research Center. * IBM announces the IBM System/360-67, a

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

CPU with

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

hardware (August 1965). ;1966 *IBM ships the S/360-67 computer in June 1966. * IBM begins work on CP-67, a re-implementation of CP-40 for the S/360-67. ;1967 * In January, CP-40 goes into production time-sharing use, followed by CP-67 in April. ;1968 *CP/CMS is installed at eight initial customer sites. * CP/CMS is submitted to IBM Type-III Library by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

's Lincoln Laboratory. * Resale of CP/CMS access begins at time-sharing vendor National CSS (becoming a distinct version, eventually renamed VP/CSS).

1970s

IBM announces the System/370 in 1970. In 1972, IBM announces that

would be made available on all S/370 models, and also announces several virtual storage operating systems, including VM/370. By the mid-1970s, CP/CMS, VM, and VP/CSS are running on numerous large IBM mainframes. ;1971 * The first System/370, the S/370-155, is shipped in January. ;1972 *Announcement of virtual memory being added to System/370 series. * VM/370 announced – and running on announcement date. VM/370 includes the ability to run VM under VM (previously implemented both at IBM and at user sites under CP/CMS, but not made part of standard releases) ;1973 * First shipment of announced virtual memory S/370 models (April: -158, May: -168). ;1977 * Initial commercial release of VAX/VMS, later renamed OpenVMS. ;1979 * The

chroot chroot is a shell (computer), shell command (computing), command and a system call on Unix and Unix-like operating systems that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its Child process, children. A program that i ...

system call is introduced during development of

Version 7 Unix Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commerc ...

, laying a foundation for container virtualization.

1980s

;1985 * October 9, 1985: Announcement of the

Intel 80286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non- multiplexed address and data buses and also the f ...

-based AT&T 6300+ with Simultask, a virtual machine monitor developed by

Locus Computing Corporation Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS (operating system), LOCUS distributed computing, distributed operating system at UCL ...

in collaboration with

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

, enabling the direct execution of an

Intel 8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit computing, 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-b ...

realmode guest operating system under a host Unix System V Release 2 OS. ;1987 *January 1987: A "product evaluation" version of Merge/386 from

is made available to OEMs. Merge/386 made use of the

Virtual 8086 mode In the 80386 microprocessor and later, virtual 8086 mode (also called virtual real mode, V86-mode, or VM86) allows the execution of real mode applications that are incapable of running directly in protected mode while the processor is running ...

provided by the

Intel 80386 The Intel 386, originally released as the 80386 and later renamed i386, is the third-generation x86 architecture microprocessor from Intel. It was the first 32-bit computing, 32-bit processor in the line, making it a significant evolution in ...

processor, and supported multiple simultaneous virtual 8086 machines. The virtual machines supported unmodified guest operating systems and standalone programs such as

Microsoft Flight Simulator ''Microsoft Flight Simulator'' is a series of Flight simulation video game, flight simulator programs for MS-DOS, Classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was an early product in the Microsoft application portfolio and diff ...

; but in typical usage the guest was MS-DOS with a Locus proprietary redirector (also marketed for networked PCs as "PC-Interface") and a "network" driver that provided communication with a regular user-mode file server process running under the host operating system on the same machine. * October 1987: Retail Version 1.0 of Merge/386 begins shipping, offered with Microport Unix System V Release 3. ;1988 * SoftPC 1.0 for Sun is introduced in 1988 by Insignia Solutions

* SoftPC appears in its first version for Apple Inc., Apple

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

. These versions (Sun and Macintosh) only have support for DOS.

1990s

;1991 * IBM introduces OS/2 Virtual DOS machine (VDM) with support for x86 virtual 8086 mode, capable of virtualizing DOS/Windows and other 16 bit operating systems like CP/M-8

;1994 * Kevin Lawton leaves MIT Lincoln Lab and starts the

Bochs Bochs (pronounced "box") is a portable IA-32 and x86-64 IBM PC compatible emulator and debugger mostly written in C++ and distributed as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It supports emulation of the processor(s) (includ ...

project. Bochs was initially coded for x86 architecture, capable of emulating BIOS, processor and other x86-compatible hardware, by simple algorithms, isolated from the rest of the environment, eventually incorporating the ability to run different processor algorithms under x86-architecture or the host, including bios and core processor (Itanium x64, x86_64, ARM, MIPS,

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

, etc.), and with the advantage that the application is multi platform (

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, Mac, Solaris). ;1997 * The first version of

Virtual PC Virtual PC is a discontinued x86 emulator software for Microsoft Windows hosts and PowerPC-based Mac (computer), Mac hosts. It was created by Connectix in 1997 and acquired by Microsoft in 2003, after which the program was renamed Microsoft V ...

for the Macintosh platform is released in June 1997 by

Connectix Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company that released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became popular. It ...

. ;1998 *June 15: Simics/sun4m is presented at

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

'98, demonstrating full system simulation booting Linux 2.0.30 and Solaris 2.6 unmodified from dd'ed disks

* October 26: VMware files for a patent on their techniques, which was granted as U.S. Patent 6,397,24

;1999 * February 8: VMware introduces the first

x86 virtualization x86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware ...

product for the Intel IA-32 architecture, known as ''VMware Virtual Platform'', based on earlier research by its founders at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. VMware Virtual Platform is based on software emulation with a guest/host OS design that required all guest environments be stored as files under the host OS filesystem.

2000s

;2000 * FreeBSD 4.0 is released, including initial implementation of

FreeBSD jail The jail mechanism is an implementation of FreeBSD's OS-level virtualisation that allows system administrators to partition a FreeBSD-derived computer system into several independent mini-systems called ''jails'', all sharing the same kernel, with ...

s. * IBM announces

z/VM z/VM is the current version in IBM's VM family of virtual machine operating systems. First released in October 2000, z/VM remains in active use and development . It is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s, particu ...

, a new version of the VM operating system for IBM's 64-bit

z/Architecture z/Architecture, initially and briefly called ESA Modal Extensions (ESAME), is IBM's 64-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architecture, implemented by its mainframe computers. IBM introduced its first z/Architecture ...

. ;2001 *January 31, 2001,

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

and Virtutech release Simics/x86-64 ("Virtuhammer") to support the new 64-bit architecture for x86

Virtuhammer is used to port Linux distributions and the Windows kernel to x86-64 well before the first

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

processor (

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation Microprocessor, processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sl ...

) was available in April 2003. * June, Connectix launches its first version of Virtual PC for Window

* July, VMware creates the first

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

server virtualization produc

* Egenera, Inc. launches their Processor Area Network (PAN Manager) software and BladeFrame chassis which provide hardware virtualization of processing blade's (pBlade) internal disk, network interface cards, and serial consol

* The first version of Virtuozzo, based on OpenVZ, is released. ;2003 *First release of first open-source

hypervisor, Xen

* February 18:

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

acquires virtualization technologies (Virtual PC and unreleased product called "Virtual Server") from Connectix Corporation

* February 18: Development begins on

QEMU The Quick Emulator (QEMU) is a free and open-source emulator that uses dynamic binary translation to emulate a computer's processor; that is, it translates the emulated binary codes to an equivalent binary format which is executed by the mach ...

, a free and open-source hardware emulator. * Late 2003: EMC acquires VMware for $635 million. * Late 2003: VERITAS acquires Ejascent for $59 million.
November 10, 2003

releases Microsoft Virtual PC, which is a machine-level virtualization technology. ;2005 * HP releases Integrity Virtual Machines 1.0 and 1.2 which ran only

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

.
October 24, 2005
VMware releases VMware Player, a free player for virtual machines. * Sun releases Solaris 10, including Solaris Zones, for both x86/x64 and SPARC systems. ;2006
July 12, 2006
VMware releases VMware Server, a free machine-level virtualization product for the server market. * Microsoft Virtual PC 2006 is released as a free program, also in July.
July 17, 2006

bought

Softricity Microsoft Application Virtualization (also known as App-V; formerly Softricity SoftGrid) is an application virtualization and application streaming solution from Microsoft. It was originally developed by Softricity, a company based in Boston, Mas ...

.
August 16, 2006
VMware announces the winners of the virtualization appliance contest.

moka5 delivers LivePC technology. * HP releases Integrity Virtual Machines Version 2.0, which supports Windows Server 2003, CD and DVD burners, tape drives and VLAN.
December 11, 2006
Virtual Iron releases Virtual Iron 3.1, a free bare-metal virtualization product for the enterprise server virtualization market. ;2007 * KVM, a virtualization module integrated into the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

, is released.
January 15, 2007
InnoTek releases

VirtualBox Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox, Sun xVM VirtualBox and InnoTek VirtualBox) is a hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox was originally created by InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH, which was ac ...

Open Source Edition (OSE), the first professional PC virtualization solution released as open source under the GNU General Public License ( GPL). It includes some code from the

project. * Sun releases Solaris 8 Containers to enable migration of a Solaris 8 computer into a Solaris Container on a Solaris 10 system – for SPARC only. ;2008 * The first Linux kernel mainline featuring

cgroups cgroups (abbreviated from control groups) is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.) of a collection of processes. Engineers at Google started the work on this feature ...

(developed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

since 2006) is released, laying a foundation for later technologies like LXC, Docker, Systemd-nspawn and Podman.
January 15, 2008
VMware, Inc. announces it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately held

application virtualization Application virtualization is a software technology that encapsulates computer programs from the underlying operating system on which they are executed. A fully virtualized application is not installed in the traditional sense, although it is sti ...

software company.
February 12, 2008

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

announces that it had entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire InnoTek, makers of

. * April: VMware releases

VMware Workstation VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted (Type 2) hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. It enables users to set up virtual machines (VM ...

6.5 beta, the first program for Windows and Linux to enable DirectX 9 accelerated graphics on Windows XP guest

* August 6: LXC, an OS-level virtualization method for Linux, is released.

2010s

;2011 * The first stable version of QEMU is released. ;2013 * Docker, Inc. releases Docker, a series of

platform as a service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

(PaaS) products that use

OS-level virtualization OS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) virtualization paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances, including containers ( LXC, Solaris Containers, AIX WPARs, HP-UX SRP Containers, D ...

. ;2014 * The first public build of

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

is released on September 8, 2014. When Kubernetes debuted, it offered a number of advantages over Docker, the most popular containerization platform at the time. The purpose of Kubernetes was to make it simple for users to deploy containerized applications across a sizable cluster of container hosts. In order to offer more features and functionality for managing containerized applications at scale, Kubernetes was created to complement Docker rather than to completely replace it.

References

External links

Application Virtualization: Streamlining Distribution
August 31, 2006—By James Drews
Windows Virtualization
from Microsoft
Virtualization Overview
from VMware
An introduction to Virtualization

Weblog post
on the how virtualization can be used to implement

Mandatory Access Control In computer security, mandatory access control (MAC) refers to a type of access control by which a secured environment (e.g., an operating system or a database) constrains the ability of a ''subject'' or ''initiator'' to access or modify on an ' ...

.
The Effect of Virtualization on OS Interference
in PDF format.

Attacks on virtual machine emulators
{{Timelines of computing

Virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

Virtualization