VMware LLC is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. VMware ESXi, its enterprise software hypervisor, is an operating system that runs on server hardware. On November 22, 2023, Broadcom Inc. acquired VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at US$69 billion, with the End-User Computing (EUC) division of VMware then sold to KKR and rebranded to Omnissa.

History

Early history

In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion. Greene and Rosenblum were graduate students 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). VMware operated in stealth mode for the first year, 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 (host-less). In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) technology. 64-bit support was introduced in 2004.

Acquisition by EMC

On January 9, 2004, under the terms of the definitive agreement announced on December 15, 2003, EMC (now Dell EMC) acquired the company with US$625 million in cash. On August 14, 2007, EMC sold 15% of VMware to the public via an initial public offering. Shares were priced at US$29 per share and closed the day at US$51. On July 8, 2008, after disappointing financial performance, the board of directors fired VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, who was replaced by Paul Maritz, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit. Greene had been CEO since the company's founding, ten years earlier. On September 10, 2008, Mendel Rosenblum, the company's co-founder, chief scientist, and the husband of Diane Greene, resigned. On September 16, 2008, VMware announced a collaboration with Cisco Systems. One result was the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch, an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure. In April 2011, EMC transferred control of the Mozy backup service to VMware. On April 12, 2011, VMware released an open-source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, as well as a hosted version of the service. This supported application deployment for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Scala, as well as database support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ. In August 2012, Pat Gelsinger was appointed as the new CEO of VMware, coming over from EMC. Paul Maritz went over to EMC as Head of Strategy before moving on to lead the Pivotal spin-off. In March 2013, VMware announced the corporate spin-off of Pivotal Software, with General Electric investing in the company. Most of VMware's application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization. In May 2013, VMware launched its own IaaS service, vCloud Hybrid Service, at its new Palo Alto headquarters (vCloud Hybrid Service was rebranded vCloud Air and later sold to cloud provider OVH), announcing an early access program in a Las Vegas data center. The service is designed to function as an extension of its customer's existing vSphere installations, with full compatibility with existing virtual machines virtualized with VMware software and tightly integrated networking. The service is based on vCloud Director 5.1/vSphere 5.1. In September 2013, at VMworld San Francisco, VMware announced the general availability of vCloud Hybrid Service and expansion to Sterling, Virginia, Santa Clara, California, Dallas, Texas, and a service beta in the UK. It announced the acquisition of Desktone in October 2013.

Acquisition by Dell

In January 2016, in anticipation of Dell's acquisition of EMC, VMware announced a restructuring to reduce about 800 positions, and some executives resigned. The entire development team behind VMware Workstation and Fusion was disbanded and all US developers were immediately fired. On April 24, 2016, maintenance release 12.1.1 was released. On September 8, 2016, VMware announced the release of Workstation 12.5 and Fusion 8.5 as a free upgrade supporting Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. In April 2016, VMware president and COO Carl Eschenbach left VMware to join Sequoia Capital, and Martin Casado, VMware's general manager for its Networking and Security business, left to join Andreessen Horowitz. Analysts commented that the cultures at Dell and EMC, and at EMC and VMware, are different, and said that they had heard that impending corporate cultural collisions and potentially radical product overlap pruning, would cause many EMC and VMware personnel to leave; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, following rumors, categorically denied that he would leave. In August 2016 VMware introduced the VMware Cloud Provider website. Mozy was transferred to Dell in 2016 after the merger of Dell and EMC. In April 2017, according to Glassdoor, VMware was ranked 3rd on the list of highest paying companies in the United States. In Q2 2017, VMware sold vCloud Air to French cloud service provider OVH. On January 13, 2021, VMware announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger would be leaving to step in at Intel. Intel is where Gelsinger spent 30 years of his career and was Intel's first chief technology officer. CFO Zane Rowe became interim CEO while the board searched for a replacement.

Spinoff from Dell

On April 15, 2021, it was reported that Dell would spin off its remaining stake in VMware to shareholders and that the two companies would continue to operate without major changes for at least five years. The spinoff was completed on November 1, 2021. On May 12, 2021, VMware announced that Raghu Raghuram would take over as CEO. In May 2022, VMware announced that the company had partnered with Formula One motor racing team, McLaren Racing.

Log4Shell vulnerability

Beginning in January 2022, hackers infiltrated servers using the Log4Shell vulnerability at organizations who failed to implement available patches released by VMware according to PCMag. ZDNET reported in March 2022 that hackers utilized Log4Shell on some customers' VMware servers to install backdoors and for cryptocurrency mining. In May 2022, Bleeping Computer reported that the Lazarus Group cybercrime group, which is possibly linked to North Korea, was actively using Log4Shell "to inject backdoors that fetch information-stealing payloads on VMware Horizon servers", including VMware Horizon.

Acquisition by Broadcom

On May 26, 2022, Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware for approximately $61 billion in cash and stock in addition to assuming $8 billion of VMware's net debt, and that Broadcom Software Group would rebrand and operate as VMware. In November 2022, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority regulator announced it would investigate whether the acquisition would "result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services". The transaction closed on November 22, 2023, after a prolonged delay in getting approval from the Chinese regulator on an additional condition that VMware's server software should maintain compatibility with third-party hardware and not require the use of Broadcom's hardware products. On completion, Broadcom reorganized the company into four divisions: VMware Cloud Foundation, Tanzu, Software-Defined Edge, and Application Networking and Security, and subsequently laid off over 2,800 employees. Broadcom also relocated its headquarters from North San Jose to VMware's headquarters campus in Palo Alto. On December 13, 2023, VMware ended availability for perpetually licensed products such as vSphere and Cloud Foundation, moving exclusively to subscription-based offerings. The company stated that this had been planned as an eventuality prior to the Broadcom acquisition. In February 2024 private equity firm KKR and Broadcom agreed for KKR to acquire Broadcom's End-User Computing (EUC) Division, formerly a division of VMware, for about $4 billion. This includes the VDI product Horizon and the device management suite Workspace ONE, formerly AirWatch. On May 14, 2024, it was announced that VMware Workstation Pro and VMware Fusion Pro would be made free for personal use, with commercial use still requiring payment. In November 2024, VMware announced that commercial use would be free too.

Acquisitions

Litigation

In March 2015, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig in Hamburg, Germany against VMware for alleged violation of his copyrights in its ESXi product. Hellwig's core claim is that ESXi is a derivative work of the GPLv2-licensed Linux kernel 2.4, and therefore VMware is not in compliance with GPLv2 because it does not publish the source code to ESXi. VMware publicly stated that ESXi is not a derivative of the Linux kernel, denying Hellwig's core claim. VMware said it offered a way to use Linux device drivers with ESXi, and that code does use some Linux GPLv2-licensed code and so it had published the source, meeting GPLv2 requirements. The lawsuit was dismissed by the court in July 2016 and Hellwig announced he would file an appeal. The appeal was decided February 2019 and again dismissed by German court, on the basis of not meeting "procedural requirements for the burden of proof of the plaintiff." In May 2023, VMware was ordered to pay $84.5 million for patent infringement on two patents belonging to Densify, a Canadian software company.

Current products

VMware's most notable products are its hypervisors. VMware became well known for its first type 2 hypervisor known as VMware Workstation. This product has since evolved into two additional hypervisor product lines: VMware's type 1 hypervisors running directly on hardware (ESX/ESXi) and their discontinued hosted type 2 hypervisors (GSX). 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, 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'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.

Desktop software

Server software

Cloud management software

Application management

Storage and availability

VMware's storage and availability products are composed of two primary offerings:

Networking and security products

Other products