A virtual machine is a software-based emulation of a physical computer that runs its own operating system and applications as if it were a separate machine, while actually sharing the underlying hardware of a single physical host with other virtual machines. IBM's Cambridge Scientific Center developed the technique in the late 1960s with the experimental CP-40 system and its successor CP-67, which let a single mainframe present multiple users with what each believed was their own dedicated computer, a capability IBM commercialized in its VM family of operating systems through the 1970s. The idea moved from mainframes to ordinary desktop and server hardware decades later when the company VMware, founded in 1998, released VMware Workstation in 1999, and virtual machines are now a foundational technology behind modern data centers and cloud computing, letting one physical server run many isolated operating system instances at once.
Facts
SignificanceCP-67/CMS was the first widely available virtual machine architecture. 1 FAQs
Does a virtual machine run on separate hardware of its own?
No. The shared physical host still does the actual execution.
No. A virtual machine behaves like a separate computer, but the physical hardware still does the execution. The host's processor carries out the instructions that the virtual machines request, which is why many of them can share one physical host.
Connections
Sources
1. Virtual machine, Wikipedia
Virtualization techniques
This approach was pioneered in 1966 with the IBM CP-40 and CP-67, predecessors of the VM family.
History
The first widely available virtual machine architecture was the CP-67/CMS (see History of CP/CMS for details).
In Group: Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure, Lead paragraph
is the virtualization or emulation of a computer system
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