History
The early history of VM is described in the articles CP/CMS and History of CP/CMS. VM/370 was a reimplementation of CP/CMS, and was made available in 1972 as part of IBM's "System/370 Advanced Function" announcement (which added virtual memory hardware and operating systems to the System/370 series). Early releases of VM continued in open source, and today are considered to be in the public domain. This policy ended in the mid '80s, when VM became a "For-charge Licensed System Product".
VM remained an important platform within IBM, used for operating system development and time-sharing use; but for customers it remained IBM's "other operating system". The OS and DOS families remained IBM's strategic products, and customers were not encouraged to run VM. Those that did formed close working relationships, continuing the community-support model of early CP/CMS users. In the meantime, the system struggled with political infighting within IBM over what resources should be available to the project, as compared with other IBM efforts. A basic "problem" with the system was seen at IBM's field sales level: VM/CMS demonstrably reduced the amount of hardware needed to support a given number of time-sharing users. IBM was, after all, in the business of selling computer systems.
Melinda Varian provides this fascinating quote, illustrating VM's unexpected success:
The marketing forecasts for VM/370 predicted that no more than one 168 would ever run VM during the entire life of the product. In fact, the first 168 delivered to a customer ran only CP and CMS. Ten years later, ten percent of the large processors being shipped from Poughkeepsie would be destined to run VM, as would a very substantial portion of the mid-range machines that were built in Endicott. Before fifteen years had passed, there would be more VM licenses than MVS licenses.
VM's role changed within IBM when hardware evolution led to significant changes in processor architecture. Backward compatibility remained a cornerstone of the IBM mainframe family, which still used the basic instruction set introduced with the original System/360; but the need for efficient use of the 64-bit zSeries made the VM approach much more attractive. VM was also utilized in data centers converting from DOS/VSE to OS/MVS and is useful when running mainframe AIX and Linux, platforms that were to become increasingly important. The current z/VM platform has finally achieved the recognition within IBM that VM users long felt it deserved. Some z/VM sites run thousands of simultaneous virtual machine users on a single system. z/VM was first released in October 2000 and remains in active use and development.
IBM and third parties have offered many applications and tools that run under VM. Examples include RAMIS, FOCUS, SPSS, NOMAD, DB2, REXX, RACF, and OfficeVision. Current VM offerings run the gamut of mainframe applications, including HTTP servers, database managers, analysis tools, engineering packages, and financial systems.
Read more about this topic: VM (operating System)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)