VMware, Inc. is an American software company that
provides cloud and virtualization software and services, and
was the first to successfully
virtualize the x86 architecture
Founded in 1998, VMware is based in Palo Alto,
California, USA. In 2004 it
was acquired by and became a
subsidiary of EMC
Corporation.
VMware's
desktop software runs on Microsoft
Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, while its enterprise
software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware
ESXi, are bare-metal hypervisors that run directly
on server hardware without requiring an
additional
underlying operating
system.
VMware developed a range of
products, most notable of
which are their hypervisors.
VMware became well known for
their first type 2 hypervisor known as GSX. This
product has
since evolved into two hypervisor products lines, VMware's
type 1
hypervisors running directly on hardware, along with
their hosted type 2
hypervisors.
VMware software provides a completely virtualized set of
hardware to the guest operating
system. VMware software
virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter, a network
adapter, and hard disk
adapters. The host provides
pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and
parallel
devices. In this way, VMware virtual machines become highly
portable
between computers, because every host looks nearly
identical to the guest. In
practice, a system administrator can
pause operations on a virtual machine
guest, move or copy
that guest to another physical computer, and there resume
execution exactly at the point of suspension. Alternatively, for
enterprise
servers, a feature called vMotion allows the
migration of operational guest
virtual machines between
similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same
storage. Each of these transitions is completely transparent to
any users on
the virtual machine at the time it is being
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