AnIntroductiontoVirtualization·Chapter1 3 While the most common form of virtualization is focused on server hardware platforms, these goals and supporting technologies have also found their way into other critical--and expensive--components of modern data centers, including storage and network infrastructures. But to answer the question "What is virtualization?" we must first discuss the history and origins of virtualization, as clearly as we understand it. The History of Virtualization In its conceived form, virtualization was better known in the 1960s as time sharing. Christopher Strachey, the first Professor of Computation at Oxford University and leader of the Programming Research Group, brought this term to life in his paper Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers. Strachey, who was a staunch advocate of main- taining a balance between practical and theoretical work in computing, was referring to what he called multi-programming. This technique would allow one programmer to develop a program on his console while another programmer was debugging his, thus avoiding the usual wait for peripherals. Multi-programming, as well as several other groundbreaking ideas, began to drive innovation, resulting in a series of