VMware

VMware Inc.

VMware's Promontory Campus headquarters, Palo Alto, California
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: VMW
Industry	Computer software
Fate	Acquired by EMC
Founded	Palo Alto, California, US, 1998 (1998)
Founder	Diane Greene Mendel Rosenblum Scott Devine Ellen Wang Edouard Bugnion
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California, US
Key people	Joseph M. Tucci (Chairman) Carl M. Eschenbach (COO) Pat Gelsinger (CEO)
Products	vSphere, ESX, ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Player, Server, VMware Service Manager, ThinApp, View, ACE, Lab Manager, Infrastructure, Converter, Site Recovery Manager, Stage Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, vCenter Operations Management Suite, VMware NSX, vRealize Business
Revenue	US$6.035 billion (2014)
Operating income	US$1.027 billion (2014)
Net income	US$0.86 billion (2014)
Total assets	US$15.216 billion (2014)
Total equity	US$7.586 billion (2014)
Number of employees	18,000 (December 31, 2014)
Parent	EMC Corporation (since 2004)
Website	VMware.com

VMware, Inc. is an American company that provides cloud and virtualization software and services, and claims to be the first to successfully virtualize the x86 architecture commercially. Founded in 1998, VMware is based in Palo Alto, California. In 2004 it was acquired by and became a subsidiary of EMC Corporation, then on August 14, 2007, EMC sold 15% of the company in a New York Stock Exchange IPO. The company trades under the symbol VMW.

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.

History

In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum, who are married, first met while at the University of California, Berkeley. Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005, and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco). For the first year, VMware operated in stealth mode, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998. The company was launched officially early in the second year, in February 1999, at the DEMO Conference organized by Chris Shipley. The first product, VMware Workstation, was delivered in May 1999, and 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, the VMotion, and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support appeared in 2004. The same year, the company was acquired by EMC Corporation for US$625 million.

In August 2007, EMC released 15% of the company's shares in VMware in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock debuted at US$29 per share and closed the day at $51.

On July 8, 2008, VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, was unexpectedly fired by the VMware Board of Directors and replaced by Paul Maritz, a retired 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit. In the same news release VMware stated that 2008 revenue growth will be "modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007". As a result, market price of VMware dropped nearly 25%. Then, on September 10, 2008, Rosenblum, the company's chief scientist, resigned.

On September 16, 2008, VMware announced its collaboration with Cisco to provide joint data center solutions. One of the first results of this is the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch that will be an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.

On April 12, 2011, VMware released an open source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, as well as a hosted version of the service. This supported application deployment for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Scala, as well as database support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ.

In March 2013, VMware gave details of a spin-off of Pivotal. All of VMware's application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization. It also announced that it was introducing its own IaaS service, vCloud Hybrid Service, in a shift of its strategy of selling software to cloud service providers.

In April 2013, Pivotal was formally created with GE as a minority shareholder.

In May 2013, VMware launched vCloud Hybrid Service at its new Palo Alto headquarters (vCloud Hybrid Service now known as vCloud Air), announcing an early access program in a Las Vegas data center. The service is designed to function as an extension of its customer's existing vSphere installations, with full compatibility with existing virtual machines virtualized with VMware software and tightly integrated networking. The service is based on vCloud Director 5.1/vSphere 5.1.

In September 2013 at VMworld San Francisco, VMware announced general availability of vCloud Hybrid Service and expansion to Sterling, Virginia, Santa Clara, California, Dallas, Texas, and a service beta in the UK. It also pre-announced a disaster recovery and desktop-as-a-service offering based on Desktone, which it went on to acquire in October 2013.

Acquisitions

Date	Company	Notes
October 2005	Asset Optimization Group	Specialized in capacity planning.
June 2006	Akimbi Systems	Specialized in lab management.
September 2007	Dunes Technologies	VMware acquired the Swiss company for an undisclosed sum.
May 2008	B-hive Networks	VMware acquired the Israeli start-up for an undisclosed sum. Following the acquisition VMware opened an R&D center in Israel, based initially on B-Hive’s facilities and team in Israel.
October 2008	Trango Virtual Processors	Was a Grenoble-based mobile hypervisor developer.
November 26, 2008	Tungsten Graphics	Core expertise in 3D graphics driver development.
August 10, 2009	SpringSource	Performed enterprise and web application development and management. The acquisition allowed use of the term platform as a service (PaaS). The acquisition expanded VMware's education services to include SpringSource University and its authorized training partners such as Spring People in India. The SpringSource assets became part of the Pivotal joint venture in April 2013.
January 12, 2010	Zimbra (software)	Designed for open-source collaboration, it was bought from Yahoo and (later sold in July 2013 to Telligent Systems).
May 6, 2010	GemStone	Incorporated into VMware's SpringSource division.
April 26, 2011	SlideRocket	A startup which developed a SaaS application for building business presentations that are stored online. Through a Web-based interface, users can handle all parts of the process, from designing slides and compiling content, to reviewing documents and publishing and delivering them. VMware subsequently sold SlideRocket to ClearSlide on March 5, 2013.
August 2011	PacketMotion	User Activity Monitoring startup. Their PacketSentry product was planned to be incorporated into VMware vCloud Networking and Security but then it was EOSL'd by the end of 2012.
May 22, 2012	Wanova
July 2, 2012	DynamicOps
July 23, 2012	Nicira Inc
February 11, 2013	Virsto
October 15, 2013	Desktone
January 22, 2014	AirWatch and Wandering WiFi	Acquired for $1.54 billion.
March 6, 2014	ThirdSky	ITIL/ITSM Consulting.
August 20, 2014	CloudVolumes (formerly SnapVolumes)
October 29, 2014	Continuent

Litigation

In March 2015, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for violation of his copyrights in its ESXi product. The case will be heard in Hamburg, Germany. The SFC claims VMware is using both the Linux kernel and Busybox without respecting the terms of the GPL copyright license, while VMware told journalists that it believed the case was without merit and expressed disappointment that Conservancy had resorted to litigation.

Core product design

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 (or, with vMotion Storage, separate storage can be used, too). Each of these transitions is completely transparent to any users on the virtual machine at the time it is being migrated.

VMware Workstation, Server, and ESX take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than that of emulators (such as Bochs) which simulate the function of each CPU instruction on the target machine one-by-one, or that of dynamic recompilation which compiles blocks of machine-instructions the first time they execute, and then uses the translated code directly when the code runs subsequently (Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac OS X takes this approach.) 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. Software that is CPU agnostic can usually survive such a transition, unless it is agnostic by forking at startup, in which case, the software or the guest OS must be stopped before moving it, then restarted after the move.

VMware's products predate the virtualization extensions to the x86 instruction set, and do not require virtualization-enabled processors. On newer processors, the hypervisor is now designed to take advantage of the extensions. However, unlike many other hypervisors, VMware still supports older processors. In such cases, it uses the CPU to run code directly whenever possible (as, for example, when running user-mode and virtual 8086 mode code on x86). When direct execution cannot operate, such as with kernel-level and real-mode code, VMware products use Binary translation (BT) to re-write the code dynamically. The translated code gets stored in spare memory, typically at the end of the address space, which segmentation mechanisms can protect and make invisible. For these reasons, VMware operates dramatically faster than emulators, running at more than 80% of the speed that the virtual guest operating-system would run directly on the same hardware. In one study VMware claims a slowdown over native ranging from 0–6 percent for the VMware ESX Server.

VMware's approach avoids some of the difficulties of virtualization on x86-based platforms. Virtual machines may deal with offending instructions by replacing them, or by simply running kernel-code in user-mode. Replacing instructions runs the risk that the code may fail to find the expected content if it reads itself; one cannot protect code against reading while allowing normal execution, and replacing in-place becomes complicated. Running the code unmodified in user-mode will also fail, as most instructions which just read the machine-state do not cause an exception and will betray the real state of the program, and certain instructions silently change behavior in user-mode. One must always rewrite; performing a simulation of the current program counter in the original location when necessary and (notably) remapping hardware code breakpoints.

Although VMware virtual machines run in user-mode, VMware Workstation itself requires the installation of various drivers in the host operating-system, notably to dynamically switch the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT).

The VMware product line can also run different operating systems on a dual-boot system simultaneously by booting one partition natively while using the other as a guest within VMware Workstation.

Products

Desktop software

• 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.
• VMware Fusion provides similar functionality for users of the Intel Mac platform, along with full compatibility with virtual machines created by other VMware products.
• VMware Player version 7.10 was freeware for non-commercial use, without requiring a licence for VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion; or for commercial use with permission. After version 7, VMware Player became VMware Workstation Player version 12.

Server software

VMware has produced two virtualization products for servers:

1. VMware vSphere (also called "ESXi"), an enterprise-level product, can deliver greater performance than the freeware VMware Server, due to lower system overhead. VMware ESXi, as a "bare-metal" product, runs directly on the server hardware, allowing virtual servers to also use hardware more or less directly. In addition, VMware ESXi integrates into VMware vCenter, which offers extra services
2. VMware Server (formerly called "GSX Server"; obsolete as of 2011) was also provided free of charge for non-commercial use, like VMware Player, and can also set up virtual machines. As a "hosted" application, VMware Server runs within an existing Linux or Windows operating system.

Cloud management software

• VMware vRealize™ Suite - a cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud.
• VMware EVO SDDC - EVO SDDC provides an easy way to deploy and operate a private cloud on an integrated SDDC system
• VMware Go was a web-based service to guide users of any expertise level through the installation and configuration of VMware vSphere Hypervisor. It was end-of-lifed in early 2014.

Public cloud platform

• VMware vCloud Air

Virtual desktop infrastructure

• VMware Horizon View, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution.

Application management

• VMware Workspace Portal - a self-service app store for workspace management

Backup software

In April 2011, EMC transferred control of Mozy to VMware.

Mozy produced MozyHome and MozyPro. MozyHome is the consumer version of the Mozy backup service. It is available to buy on a monthly subscription. MozyPro is the business version of the Mozy backup service. MozyPro requires a separate license for each computer that is being backed up, as well as a server license for any server that is being backed up. Customers then pay per gigabyte of data they have in the data center.

Networking and security products

vCloud Networking and Security was a software-defined networking and security solution, but as of 18 April 2014 has been superseded by vSphere NSX, VMware's new software-defined data center (SDDC). Compare VMware NSX.

See also

• Comparison of platform virtualization software
• Hardware virtualization
• Hypervisor
• VMware VMFS

External links

• Official website