Another piece of, what I hope is wisdom, coming from my last three months of customer conversations is that virtualisation has three dimensions, Atomisation, Aggregation and Longevity.
We use virtualisation to make large systems small. I call this “Atomisation”. We can also use virtualisation technologies to make many components seem as one, this is of critical use for horizontally scalable services, and I call this “Aggregation”. The third dimension is “Longevity”.
Maybe I should play around with “Age” as a word, so each dimension has a mnemonic starting with “A”, but by using a Type II hypervisor, one can protect old software against platform innovation and continue to run it until its business case changes or expires, as you can see from my experiments with getting Little Big Adventure running again.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, and reposted here in July 2016 with a new graphic to illustrate the article.