VMware

VMware Inc.

The 2011-present logo
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: VMW
Industry	Computer software
Fate	Acquired by EMC
Founded	Palo Alto, California, USA, 1998
Founder(s)	Diane Greene Mendel Rosenblum Scott Devine Edward Wang Edouard Bugnion
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California, USA
Key people	Joseph M. Tucci (Chairman) Carl M. Eschenbach (COO) Pat Gelsinger (CEO)
Products	vSphere, ESX Server, ESXi Server, Workstation, Fusion, Player, Server, VMware Service Manager, ThinApp, View, ACE, Lab Manager, Infrastructure, Converter, Site Recovery Manager, Stage Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, VMFS
Revenue	US$ 4.61 billion (2012)
Operating income	US$ 872 million (2012)
Net income	US$ 746 million (2012)
Total assets	US$ 8.09 billion (2012)
Total equity	US$ 4.63 billion (2012)
Employees	13,000 (2012)
Parent	EMC Corporation (since 2004)
Website	VMware.com

VMware, Inc. is an American software company that provides cloud and virtualization software and services.^[1][2][3] It was founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary.

VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, while VMware's enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, are bare-metal embedded hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.^[4]

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.^[5] Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005,^[6] and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco).

The company has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, United States, and established an R&D Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as one at the Time Warner Center in New York City, in 2005.

VMware operated throughout 1998 in stealth mode with roughly 20 employees by the end of that year. The company was launched officially in February 1999 at the DEMO Conference organized by Chris Shipley.^[7]

VMware delivered its first product, VMware Workstation, in May 1999^[8] and entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless).^[9] In 2003 VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, the VMotion and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support appeared in 2004. The company was also acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004 for $625 million.^[10]

In August 2007, EMC Corporation released 10% 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.^[11]

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.^[12] 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 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 that will be an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.^[13]

On 12 April 2011, they released an open source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, and a hosted version of the service. This supports application deployment for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, Scala and support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ.^[14]

Acquisitions

In June 2006, VMware acquired privately held Akimbi Systems.^[15]

In May 2008, VMware acquired Israeli start-up company B-hive Networks 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.^[16]

In October 2008 Vmware acquired Grenoble-based mobile hypervisor developer Trango Virtual Processors.^[17]

On November 26, 2008, VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, a company with core expertise in 3D graphics driver development. ^[18]

On August 10, 2009, VMware announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.^[19] The acquisition is seen by the industry as a strategic move of VMware to become a leader in offering platform as a service (PaaS). The acquisition also resulted in the expansion of VMware's education services portfolio by the inclusion of SpringSource University and its authorized training partner, SpringPeople Technologies.

On January 12, 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, an open-source collaboration software tool, from Yahoo.

On May 6, 2010, VMware acquired GemStone, to be operated under VMware's SpringSource division.

On August 31st, 2010, VMware announced its intention to acquire TriCipher and Integrien.^[20]

On 26 April 2011, VMware acquired 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

On May 16, 2011 VMware announced its intent to acquire Shavlik Technologies. VMware already used Shavlik technology in its vCenter Update Manager product, and co-developed the VMware Go offering.

On 31 May 2011, VMware acquired Socialcast, a group workstream service.

On 13 June 2011, VMware acquired Digital Fuel, IT Financial and Business Management SaaS Company.

On 24 April 2012, VMware acquired Cetas Software.

On 22 May 2012, VMware acquired Wanova.

On 2 July 2012, VMware acquired DynamicOps.^[21]

On 23rd July 2012, VMware acquired Nicira Inc.^[22]

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.^[23] 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 emulators (such as Bochs) 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 (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.^[24]

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

VMware vSphere, a holistic view

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 is for users without a license to use VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion. VMware offers this software as a freeware product for personal use. While initially not able to create virtual machines, this limitation was removed in version 3.0.1.

Server software

VMware markets two virtualization products for servers:

• VMware ESX (formerly called "ESX Server"), an enterprise-level product, can deliver greater performance than the freeware VMware Server, due to lower system overhead. VMware ESX is a "bare-metal" product, running directly on the server hardware, allowing virtual servers to also use hardware more or less directly. In addition, VMware ESX integrates into VMware vCenter, which offers extra services to enhance the reliability and manageability of a server deployment, such as
  • VMotion — the capability to move a running virtual machine from one ESX host to another and faster than some other editions
  • Storage VMotion — the capability to move a running virtual machine from one storage device to another
  • DRS — Distributed Resource Scheduler — automatic load balancing of an ESX cluster using VMotion
  • HA — High Availability — In case of hardware failure in a cluster, the virtual servers will automatically restart on another host in the cluster

• VMware Server (formerly called "GSX Server", now both obsolete^[25]) was^[26] also provided as freeware for non-commercial use, like VMware Player, and it is also possible to create virtual machines with it. It is a "hosted" application, which runs within an existing Linux or Windows operating system.

Cloud Management Software

• VMware vCloud
  • VMware vCloud Director enables self-service access to logical pools of compute, network and storage resources with policy driven controls and service level agreements.
  • VMware vCloud Datacenter Services
  • VMware vCloud Express
  • VMware vCloud Consulting Services
  • VMware vCloud API

• VMware Go^[27] is a web-based service to guide users of any expertise level through the installation and configuration of VMware vSphere Hypervisor.

Application Platform

• VMware vFabric tcServer, an enterprise Tomcat App server.
• VMware vFabric Enterprise Ready, an enterprise Apache Web server.
• VMware vFabric Hyperic provides web and custom application monitoring and performance management for physical, virtual and cloud environments.
• VMware vFabric GemFire Is an in memory data grid that enables real-time data distribution, data replication, caching and data management using a non-relational key-value store, to allow storage of data for client applications.
• RabbitMQ provides robust and reliable inter-system messaging for modern applications.
• VMware vFabric SQLFire is memory-oriented data management software delivering application data at runtime with horizontal scale and lightning-fast performance while providing developers with the well-known SQL interface and tools.
• VMware vFabric Web Server increases your web tiers performance, scalability and security while reducing deployment times and complexity with VMware vFabric Web Server, the HTTP server and load-balancing component of the vFabric Cloud Platform.

Backup software

In April 2011, EMC transferred control of Mozy to VMware, a move which will assist VMware in targeting its increasing number of cloud-based offerings towards small and medium-sized business.^[28]

Mozy produces two products. MozyHome and MozyPro.^[29]

• MozyHome is the consumer version of the Mozy backup service. It is available to buy on a monthly subscription.^[30]
• MozyPro is the business class 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.^[31]

Other products

VMware vCenter Converter (VMware Converter) comes in both Enterprise ($, bundling and entitlement with vCenter Server) and Standalone (free) versions and is designed primarily for the following tasks:^[32]

• Convert a physical machine into a virtual machine; referred to as Physical-to-Virtual or P2V.
• Convert a virtual machine of one type into another (V2V)
• Run automated configuration tasks on VMware ESX/ESXi servers.

Converted VMs are compatible with VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Server and VMware Workstation. A P2V conversion can be done from any physical machine running Microsoft Windows (XP or later) or Linux based (Linux only works on Standalone version). Conversions can be managed from a centralized console allowing for multiple conversions at the same time (using the Enterprise version). VMware vCenter Converter replaces^[update] the older VMware products "P2V Assistant" and "Importer". P2V Assistant allowed users to convert physical machines into virtual machines; and Importer allowed the import of virtual machines from other products into VMware Workstation.

VMware Capacity Planner, an information technology (IT) capacity planning tool, collects utilization-data in heterogeneous computing environments and compares it to industry-standard reference-data to provide analysis and decision-support modeling.

VMware ACE provides a means of distributing secured virtual desktops to networked client PCs.

VMware ThinApp, formerly Thinstall, is a virtualization suite capable of creating portable software ("portable apps"). This software enables applications to execute without being previously installed.

VMware Infrastructure is a collection of VMware products used to manage a VMware ESX/ESXi server environment.

VMware vSphere is a "cloud OS". VMware vSphere 4 was originally named VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) 4 and is capable of managing large pools of infrastructure, including software and hardware^[33] both from internal and external networks.

The VMware Tools package adds drivers and utilities to improve the graphical performance, including mouse tracking, for different guest operating systems. The package also enables some integration between the guest and host systems, including shared folders, plug-and-play devices, clock synchronisation, and cutting-and-pasting across environments. VMware Inc makes VMware Tools available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD, and Novell NetWare guest systems.^[34]

On September 11 at VMworld 2007, VMware announced that large portions of VMware Tools for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD guests were released under GPL and GPL-compatible licenses. They also announced the creation of the Open Virtual Machine Tools ("open-vm-tools") project on Sourceforge.net.^[35]

On June 12 at Hadoop Summit 2012, VMware announced the release of Project Serengeti, open-source code that optimizes Hadoop for use in VMware virtualized environments. Serengeti will allow administrators to deploy Hadoop nodes in virtual containers, which then can be managed through VMware’s vCenter.^[36]

VMware's promontory headquarters at 3401 Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto, California

See also

• Perbandingan -- platform virtual machines
• Hardware virtualization
• Hypervisor
• VMware VMFS

References

External links

• Company home page
• VMware Virtualization Blog
• Google Maps view of VMware headquarters
• VMware IT Virtualization Solutions