The concept of a virtual environment goes back to the early sixties. It was IBM that first came with an idea of having several virtual environments within one physical machine in order to effectively isolate systems. Unfortunately poor hardware capacities of that time prevented virtualization from spreading and made it an interest for science only.

The situation radically changed in the late nineties. With new powerful x86 computers, virtualization became open to the public, delivering enormous opportunities for both, business and home segments:

• Full utilization of up-to-date powerful computers
• Utmost flexibility for a physical infrastructure
• Increased availability of hardware and applications
• Savings on hardware and energy
• Hardware independence
• Seamless system migration
• And many more…