Virtual machine monitors: current technology and future trends

TLDR

Virtual machine monitors, originally developed over 30 years ago to solve mainframe computing problems, have reemerged on commodity platforms to address security, reliability, and administration challenges, and were first explored by Stanford researchers to simplify massively parallel processing systems, ultimately leading to the creation of VMware Inc. Researchers discovered that virtual machines could make complex massively parallel architectures resemble standard platforms, enabling the use of existing operating systems, a development that attracted both academic interest and entrepreneurial investment.

Abstract

Developed more than 30 years ago to address mainframe computing problems, virtual machine monitors have resurfaced on commodity platforms, offering novel solutions to challenges in security, reliability, and administration. Stanford University researchers began to look at the potential of virtual machines to overcome difficulties that hardware and operating system limitations imposed: This time the problems stemmed from massively parallel processing (MPP) machines that were difficult to program and could not run existing operating systems. With virtual machines, researchers found they could make these unwieldy architectures look sufficiently similar to existing platforms to leverage the current operating systems. From this project came the people and ideas that underpinned VMware Inc., the original supplier of VMMs for commodity computing hardware. The implications of having a VMM for commodity platforms intrigued both researchers and entrepreneurs.