Putting the Squeeze on Microsoft's Virtual PC

Tony Austin
Monday, 28 July 2008 15:50

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft Office 365

Over half of my career at IBM was supporting within A/NZ and Asia/Pacific the IBM System/38 (S/38) announced in 1978, and its key follow-on system, the IBM Application System/400 (AS/400) announced in 1988. With more recent derivatives -- rebranded as the IBM iSeries and later the IBM System i -- these are still at the computing heart of a huge number of  organizations worldwide, but unfortunately they haven't won the mind share enjoyed by Windows and Unix/Linux systems.

There have been many times when I've cursed various versions Windows compared with what in my previous existence at IBM I was used to: the S/38's and AS/400's sophistication and extreme of ease of use for application software development, deployment and administration. And why do I say this?

In terms of virtualization, S/38 was the first widely-successful commercial system to incorporate a highly-sophisticated single-level virtual storage capability. This was built partly into the very hardware itself and partly into the lowest-level microcode, and (with lots of tweaking) lives on today in S/38's descendants.

The "single level" label signifies that, as far as the machine and its operating system are concerned, all main storage ("memory") and hard disk are regarded as a vast and uniform virtual address space. There's none of the ridiculous nonsense that still plagues Wintel (and other systems) up to this very day, where you have to specify that folders/files are to be placed on specific hard disk drives. As well as this superlative virtual storage architecture, a single System i also has its own form of virtualization enabling it to run its own operating system  alongside AIX (IBM's own form of UNIX), Linux, and Windows (via integrated IBM BladeCenter or IBM System x server hardware). While originally the S/38 was categorized as a "mid-range system" there's no doubt that its current descendants are extremely powerful, mainframe-level systems in their own right. But that's a story for another time ...

It behoves me to point out that, for lack of space in this article, I've glossed over IBM's (and others') various and important UNIX/AIX and Linux virtualization offerings.

Virtualization began in a really big way -- and I mean BIG -- with the introduction of the VM/360 operating system, and especially with the subsequent arrival of VM/370, forming the model from which just about all subsequent hypervisor virtualization is derived.

As Wikipedia nicely defines it, "a hypervisor (also: virtual machine monitor) is a virtualization platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time." And don't forget the fundamentals arose more than 40 years ago.

But that was then, and this is now! Most of us (including myself) don't have access to or the funding for large, expensive mainframe-type systems. So, where does this leave us with regard to virtualization?

PLEASE READ ON...