VMware

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, Edward 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).