IBM's 40 year history of leadership in virtualization
IBM has a long history of leadership in the area of virtualization. This is not a new technology – it has been around since 1967 on the mainframe, and was first developed for the POWER™ processor back in 1997. Since then we have been refining the technology to make it more reliable, scalable and better server your business needs.
1967 – IBM develops hypervisor that would eventually become VM on the mainframe
1973 – IBM announces S/370™ model 158 and model 168, the first two machines to do physical partitioning
1987 – PR/SM™ is announced (LPAR on the mainframe)
1990 – ES/9000™ family is announced. This is the last IBM mainframe to support physical partitioning
1997 – POWER LPAR design begins
1999 – System i™ LPAR announced
2001 – System i ships sub-processor LPAR support / System p™ ships whole processor LPAR support
2001 – LPAR introduced in POWER4™ with AIX® V5.1
2004 – Micro Partitioning™, LPAR and Virtual I/O with POWER5™ and AIX V5.3
2007 – IBM announces POWER6™, the first UNIX® servers with Live Partition Mobility
2008 – IBM introduces PowerVM™