VMWare is both a company and a product. The company is named after their flagship product. The product is virtual machine (VM) software. They have several variations of it to choose from. One is a program that runs under Windows (there’s also a Linux version and a Max OS X version). This product allows you to create VMs by assigning virtual hardware to the VM by telling the VM how much memory it has, how many hard drives, what size they are, how many CPUs, etc… You can then insert an O/S CD or DVD and have the VM boot from it and install that Operating system, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or any other Operating system that’s designed for Intel compatible hardware.
(Pictured Above: VMWare hosted in Windows 7, running Ubuntu Linux inside the Virtual Machine.)
They also have a product they call the VMWare free player. This is just like the previously mention product, except you can’t create new VMs with it or reconfigure existing VMs. It’s a free download.
They provide a free server product, called a hypervisor. And, they provide a VMWare product, that itself is an operating system. It’s a variation of Linux and boots directly to the VMWare management software. It’s a stripped down version of Linux so that you can devote most of your resources to your virtual machines. It’s intended for use on powerful servers in large machine rooms in the back office in big corporations so that they can run multiple, virtual servers on fewer physical machines than they have virtual machines. It also provides remote management so that the administrators don’t have to walk around to each physical server to maintain the virtual servers. It can all be handled remotely.
On the Mac, VMWare provides a program called “Fusion” that lets you run any desktop OS in a window on the Mac. So, you could boot to Mac OS X on your real Macintosh, then start up VMWare fusion, and boot up Windows XP inside of it, or Linux, or some other variation of Windows, or an old IBM OS/2 VM.
Competitors to VMWare are:
- Parallels
- XEN
- Virtual PC
As well as many others, but those are the big players.