What is VMware and where to use it?

Of all laptops that I ever used, my DELLs have always been most reliable, long-lasting, user-friendly and comfortable to handle. In my opinion, Michael Dell?did a perfect job of creating the perfect tool for crazy users like me (I type so much that my keyboard buttons get to look like steps in old buildings). Dell, by the way, was only 19 years old when he started making and selling computers in 1984, right out of his dorm room. Now, DELL is a multinational American computer technology company that is headquartered in Round Rock, Texas and has a completely 'green' campus of 2.1 million square feet that runs entirely on wind power that converts landfill emissions to gas.

Well, I mentioned DELL in connection with another name, VMWare, which is now a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, and the talk in this article will be about VMWare.

VM, by the way, is a shortening for virtual machines.

VMWare as a company is a virtualization and cloud computing software vendor based in Palo Alto, California. Their virtualization technologies are based on their bare-metal hypervisor* ESX/ESXi in x86 architecture that allows bare-metal embedded hypervisors to run directly on a server’s hardware without the need of a primary operating system. As always, the idea behind the complex technology is quite simple: a hypervisor is installed on the physical server to allow for multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on the same physical server. Each VM can run its own operating system, allowing multiple OSes to run on one physical server. All of the VMs on the same physical server share resources, such as networking and RAM. Brilliant, isn't it?

VMware offers a variety of products: virtualization, networking and security management tools, software-defined data center software, and storage software. Their server virtualization platform vSphere was created for implementing and managing VM infrastructures on a large scale. They also call vSphere a cloud operating system or a virtualized data center platform that enables IT departments to place application workloads on the most cost-effective compute resource available.

VMware’s most demanded server software products are VMware ESX Server, VMware ESXi Server and VMware Server.

Also, VMware collaborates with SUSE in providing cloud solutions for both private clouds and public clouds (this cloud thing is another topic that I will certainly read and write about in the nearest time.

Well, besides server applications, VMware has software for desktops, as well. It is compatible with Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.?Among their desktop products are VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and VMware Player.

So, putting it shortly, VMware technology is based on the key concept of Full Virtualization. Either in desktop environment, or in server environment, VMware implements full virtualization. In both the cases, full virtualization is possible through the direct execution for non-sensitive instructions and binary translation for sensitive instructions or hardware traps, thus enabling the virtualization of architecture like x86.?

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* Hypervisor is a form of virtualization software used in Cloud hosting to divide and allocate the resources on various pieces of hardware. The program which provides partitioning, isolation or abstraction is called virtualization hypervisor. The hypervisor is a hardware virtualization technique that allows multiple guest operating systems (OS) to run on a single host system at the same time. A hypervisor is sometimes also called a virtual machine manager(VMM)