VMware
for-profit maker of virtualization software, acquired by Broadcom Inc. in 2023
VMware LLC is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S. On November 22, 2023, Broadcom acquired VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $69 billion, with the End-User Computing division of VMware then sold to KKR and rebranded to Omnissa. 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.
History
Early history
Technical background
Virtualizing the x86 architecture was widely considered impractical in the late 1990s. Unlike the IBM System/370 mainframe architecture, which had supported virtualization since the 1960s, the x86 instruction set contained seventeen instructions that did not meet the Popek and Goldberg requirements for classical virtualization, behaving differently in privileged and unprivileged modes without generating traps that a virtual machine monitor could intercept.
VMware's technical approach grew out of the Disco research project at Stanford University, led by Mendel Rosenblum, which had virtualized the MIPS architecture for large ccNUMA multiprocessors in the mid-1990s. The founders' key insight was that x86 could be virtualized by combining direct execution of user-mode code with binary translation of kernel-mode code, dynamically rewriting problematic instructions at runtime.
Founding
VMware was founded in 1998 by Stanford computer science professor Mendel Rosenblum; his wife Diane Greene, who became the company's CEO and had previously led several technology startups; Rosenblum's Stanford graduate students Edouard Bugnion and Scott Devine; and Edward Wang, an associate of Greene's from the University of California, Berkeley. According to Greene, early fundraising was difficult, as investors of the period were focused on consumer internet startups and did not understand the value of virtualization on commodity PC hardware. VMware operated in stealth mode for its first year, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998, and launched publicly at the DEMO conference in February 1999.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11407. VIAF identifies the subject as 259761774. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1998 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “VMware” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.