Virtualization as a 'platform' was a bit overhyped, hence my '.ova' comment. There was a push for a lot of applications to exclusively ship as a whole virtual machine, to create OS variants dedicated to the purpose of running single applications. For a lot of applications it was supremely awkward, because app developers ended up having to 'own' things they didn't want to own, like the customer network configuration.

Virtualization as a utility has of course persisted, but it's much more rare for a vendor to declare their 'runtime' to be vmware than it once was. Virtualization existed in IBM for a long time, vmware made it broadly more available and flexible in the PC space, and then around mind 2000s things started to go a bit crazy with 'virtualization is the runtime'.

Now mind you, compared to dot-com or 'big data' it was trivial, but it was all a bit silly for a time there.