VMware is a software company.
Founded in 1998, VMware is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud and virtualisation software and services.
Formerly a subsidiary of EMC, which owned 90% of the company, it moved to new ownership following the Dell acquisition of EMC in 2016 for $67bn. It is headquartered in Palo Alto, California is now a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.
VMware bases its virtualisation technology on the ESX/ESXi bare metal hypervisor, supporting virtual machines.
The company’s desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
VMware ESX is the company’s enterprise server virtualisation platform, it comes in two versions ESX Server, and ESXi Server.
What are the key features of VMware’s offerings?
Both can be deployed as part of the VMware infrastructure, on vSphere or VMware View, with the idea of enabling centralised management for data centre applications and enterprise desktops.
One of the key features of the enterprise server virtualisation platform is that the user is able to better manage server sprawl by running software applications in VMs on fewer physical servers.
VMware vSphere is the brand name for VMware’s suite of virtualisation products that includes a type 1 hypervisor.
