What is VMware?

VMware is a software company headquartered out in Palo Alto, California, ​founded in 1998, subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

It is the main provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. 

VMware history

VMware began with five forward-thinking technologists, all passionate about creating a better way to compute, come together to form VMware, Inc. with Diane Greene as CEO, Edouard Bugnion as CTO, Scott Devine as principal engineer, Mendel Rosenblum as chief scientist, and Edward Wang as principal engineer. By the end of the year, the company grows to 20 employees.

The company was launched officially early in the second year 1999, and the first product, VMware Workstation was delivered, after that the company entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless).

In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support was introduced in 2004.

In 2009, VMware launched Virtual Desktop which delivers desktops and applications not only to laptops and PCs, but to smartphones and other mobile devices

VMware products

VMware provides virtualization, networking and security management tools, software-defined data center software, and storage software. 

Its softwares are not free or open source, and they are categorized into two levels which is desktop applications and server applications. The desktop software is compatible with all major operating systems, which include Linux, Microsoft Windows, and MAC OS, while the enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware ESXi, is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.

Benefits and Drawbacks

Benefits of using VMware products

• All old applications can be run on it
• Increased efficiency and agility of data center systems
• Reuse of old hardware is easy
• Creating a personal cloud computer is feasible
• Security based on a zero-trust model, along with better security than container systems like Kubernetes
• Better provisioning of applications and resources
• Simplified data center management
• Browsing on VMWare is completely safe
• You can run Linux on top of Windows very easily
• You can access infected data

Drawbacks of VMware products

• High licensing fees
• Better Hyper-V and Xen hypervisor alternatives
• Lack of support and several bugs when used alongside Oracle products 
• Hardware compatibility issues as not everything works well with VMware

The Importance of VMware

VMware provides easy and centralized management for all servers. When there is a fear of downtime and loss of data, the best option is VMWare. All legacy software can be easily used on VMWare. It helps in consolidating server and all save a lot of money.

This article has been a simple guide to What is VMware, its history, products, benefits and drawbacks, importance 

You can get more information by following the VMware series on our website.

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References:

1. vmware official website – link: https://www.vmware.com/
2. Technology Definitions | SUSE Defines – link: https://www.suse.com/suse-defines/
3. VMware – link: https://www.techtarget.com/searchvmware/definition/VMware