I came across a well written article published on the Register today: VMware turns 25 today: Is it a mature professional or headed back to Mom’s house?. And it reminded me of when I first crossed paths with the hypervisor platform. The year was 2006 or 2007. I cannot remember exactly, let us just say it was the mid-aughts. I was working for a little known data storage company called Xyratex (later acquired by Seagate). I was not kidding when I said “little known.” Unless you were in the data storage industry, it is likely that you would have never heard of the company. We built storage arrays and JBODs and sold them directly to OEM-resellers such as NetApp, Sun Microsystems and many more (large and small companies).
Anyway, I was working with a colleague who was having a difficult time installing some implementation of a VMware offering (the details are hazy) on a random HP Prolient DL360 G4 server connected to our backend storage. I remember thinking to myself “what the heck is this and why would someone use this?” Wow, was I clueless. It would take at least a year or two before I realized the full potential of [all] virtualization software. Today, it seems like anything and everything is being virtualized and while VMware did not necessarily invent the technology, they did however make it more affordable and accessible to the rest of us before competing solutions started to grab some of its marketshare.
Petros Koutoupis is the self appointed BDFL of the RapidDisk project. Most of his career has been in software development in the data storage industry. He is deeply involved in open source software development and for years has written code for the Linux kernel, various open source device drivers and applications in both the embedded and server spaces.
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