VMware Virtualization Platform

VMware is a leading provider of virtualization and cloud computing software, founded in 1998 by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion at Stanford University. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware pioneered x86 virtualization and was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004 (which was later acquired by Dell Technologies in 2016) and subsequently spun off as an independent company in November 2021. In 2023, Broadcom completed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware. Key products: vSphere: the flagship server virtualization platform (formerly ESX/ESXi hypervisor plus vCenter Server management). ESXi is a bare-metal Type-1 hypervisor that runs directly on physical server hardware. vCenter Server provides centralized management of multiple ESXi hosts, enabling features like vMotion (live migration of running VMs), Storage vMotion, HA (High Availability), DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler for load balancing), and Fault Tolerance. Workstation Player and Workstation Pro: desktop hypervisors for Windows and Linux that allow running VMs on a local PC. Workstation Pro supports snapshots, clones, and complex virtual networking. Fusion: macOS desktop virtualization for running Windows and Linux VMs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. vSAN: software-defined storage that pools local storage from ESXi hosts into a shared datastore. NSX: network virtualization and security platform (software-defined networking). Horizon: virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote application delivery. Tanzu: Kubernetes management platform for modernizing applications. VMware Cloud Foundation: integrated stack of compute, storage, networking, and management. The company serves over 400,000 customers worldwide, including all Fortune 100 companies. C/C++. Proprietary.