The Rise of Virtual Machines?

If there is one technology that took hold in the enterprise in 2005, it's virtualization.

The software moved from test and development and into the data center faster than anyone imagined, including the experts. And while there are sure to be some bumps in the road in 2006 as the technology moves from awareness to adoption, you can bet most IT pros will be running virtualization in the data center before the end of next year.

What is it?

Virtualization is software that allows a piece of hardware to run multiple operating system images at once. The technology got its start on mainframes decades ago, allowing Big Iron to avoid wasting expensive processing power.

In 1998, EMC subsidiary VMware Inc. got into the virtualization business, and jumped from startup to powerhouse in just a few years by taking virtualization to the x86 platform.

VMware's timing was perfect...

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