The introduction of virtualization provided a boost in the possible implementation scenarios for a range of different IT systems. As virtualization technology has matured, it has increased the flexibility of IT departments, allowing them to speed up deployments of new systems and separate logical services from physical infrastructure, leading to the ability to react to business changes at a much greater pace than even a few decades ago.
The classic virtualization strategy was to implement virtual machines—an entire operating system hosted on big-iron in the background. This simple but effective system was the first major step towards encapsulating IT services into logical, mobile units that no longer relied on a permanent connection to a specific piece of hardware. The rise of VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen Server, and other virtual machine hosting environments brought about major advances in software virtualization technologies. The largest implementations of...