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VMware is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. It is majority owned by EMC Corporation. VMware’s desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and MAC OS X, while VMware's enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, and are bare-metal embedded hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system
Core product design
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. VMware Workstation, Server, and ESX take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host. VMware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present. This significantly boosts performance, but can cause problems when moving virtual machine guests between hardware hosts using different instruction-sets (such as found in 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs), or between hardware hosts with a differing number of CPUs. Stopping the virtual-machine guest before moving it to a different CPU type generally causes no issues.
Desktop software
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VMware Workstation (first product launched by VMware in 1999). This software suite allows users to run multiple instances of X86 or X86-64 compatible Operating systems on a single physical PC.
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VMware Fusion provides similar functionality for users of the Intel Mac platform, along with full compatibility with virtual machines created by other VMware products.
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VMware Player For users without a license to use VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, VMware offers this software as freeware product for personal use. While initially not able to create virtual machines, this limitation was removed in version 3.0.1
Server software
VMware markets two virtualizations
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VMware ESX (formerly called "ESX Server"), an enterprise-level product, can deliver greater performance than the freeware VMware Server, which offers extra services to enhance the reliability and manageability of a server deployment, such as VMotion- the capability to move a running virtual machine from one ESX host to another and faster than some other editions
Storage VMotion - the capability to move a running virtual machine from one storage device to another DRS - Dynamic Resource Scheduler - automatic load balancing of a ESX cluster using VMotion HA - High Availability - In case of hardware failure in a cluster, the virtual servers will automatically restart on another host in the cluster
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VMware EXSi (formerly called "VMware ESX 3i"), is quite similar to ESX, but differentiates in that the Service Console is removed, and replaced with a minimal Busy Box installation. Disk space requirements are much lower than for ESX and the memory footprint is reduced. In July 2008, VMware decided to give away ESXi for free.
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VMware Server (formerly called "GSX Server", now both obsolete) is also provided as freeware for non-commercial use, like VMware Player, and it is also possible to create virtual machines with it. It is a "hosted" application, which runs within an existing Linux or Windows operating system.
For more details please visit http://www.vmware.com
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