VMware
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| VMware Inc.. | |
| |
| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Founded | California, 1998 |
| Headquarters |  Palo Alto, California, United States
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| Key people | Paul Maritz (President & CEO) Edward Wang |
| Industry | Computer Software |
| Products | VMware ESX Server VMware Workstation VMware Fusion VMware Player VMware Server VMware ThinApp VMware View VMware ACE VMware Lab Manager VMware Converter VMware Site Recovery Manager VMware Stage Manager VMware Lifecycle Manager |
| Revenue | US $ 1.9 Billion |
| Employees | 6,500 |
| Parent | EMC Corporation |
| Website | www.vmware.com |
VMware, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in Palo Alto, California. The name "VMware" comes from the acronym "VM", meaning "virtual machine", combined with ware from the second part of "software".
VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. VMware's enterprise software, VMware ESX Server, runs directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system. This is known as being platform- or hardware-agnostic.
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History
Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang and Edouard Bugnion founded VMware in 1998a.[1] Greene had earned a Master's Degree in Naval Architecture from MIT in 1978, and in 1988 she earned a second Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Rosenblum and Greene, who are married, first met while at Stanford. Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005, and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco).
The first release, VMware workstation, was launched in 1999.[2] In 2001, the company introduced its first server products, VMware GSX [[Hypervisor|(a hosted, type2 hypervisor)] and VMware ESX [[Hypervisor|(a a hostless, type1 hypervisor)]. Virtual Center, VMotion and Virtual SMP were introduced in 2003. 64-bit support appeared in 2004. The company was also acquired by EMC Corporation that same year.
In August 2007, EMC Corporation released 10% of the company's shares in VMware in an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock debuted at 29 USD per share and closed the day at 51 USD..[3]
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 from VMware.
On September 16, 2008, VMware announced that they are collaborating 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 VMware DVS that will be an integrated option in future major releases of VMware Infrastructure.
VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D graphics driver development on November 26, 2008.
Core product design
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, Virtual Machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest. In practice, a systems 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. Alternately, for enterprise servers, a feature called VMotion allows the seemless migration of operational guest virtual machines between similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same storage.
VMware Workstation, VMware Server, and ESX Server take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than emulators, which simulate the function of each CPU instruction on the target machine one-by-one, or 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. 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. Stopping the virtual-machine guest before moving it to a different CPU type generally causes no issues.
VMware's products use 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 re-write the code dynamically, a process VMware calls "binary translation" or BT. 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. VMware claims an overhead as small as 3% to 6% for computationally-intensive applications.
VMware's virtualization does not replace offending instructions, and does not simply run kernel-code in user-mode. Both of these approaches run into difficulties on x86-based platforms. 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 GDT and the IDT tables.
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
- For more details on this topic, see List of VMware software.
See also
- Comparison of platform virtual machines
- List of VMware software
- Virtualization
- VMware VMFS
- VMware vExpert Awards
References
- ↑ "VMware Leadership". http://www.vmware.com/company/leadership.html.
- ↑ "VMware company history". http://www.vmware.com/company/mediaresource/milestones.html.
- ↑ Mullins, Robert (2007-08-14). "Update: VMware the bright spot on a gray Wall Street day". IDG News Service. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/14/VMware-the-bright-spot-on-a-gray-Wall-Street-day_1.html. Retrieved on 2007-08-15.
