What Is VMware?

Virtual machines (VMs)

Imagine running multiple web, database, and application servers on a single physical server.

That's the power of virtual machines (VMs) in server virtualization. These are software-based emulations of a physical server, complete with their own operating systems, applications, and resources.

VMs operate independently as if they were separate physical servers, but they all share the underlying hardware of a single host. This capability allows for incredible versatility in how you deploy a virtual machine and manage a virtual machine in your server environments, optimizing resource utilization and simplifying server administration.

Benefits of VMware

VMware's virtualization technology offers a compelling array of benefits for businesses of all sizes. The benefits of VMware solutions include:

• Cost savings: By consolidating multiple physical servers onto fewer machines, you can significantly reduce hardware costs, energy consumption, and data center space requirements.
   
• Increased efficiency: VMware streamlines IT management processes, making it easier to deploy, manage, and maintain your infrastructure. This leads to improved operational efficiency and reduced administrative overhead.
   
• Improved resource utilization: With virtualization, you can dynamically allocate resources to VMs as needed, ensuring optimal performance and avoiding wasted capacity. This results in better resource utilization and cost savings.
   
• Enhanced flexibility and scalability: Quickly adapt to changing business needs by easily creating, deploying, and scaling VMs. This agility allows you to respond rapidly to evolving demands and seize new opportunities.
   
• Increased uptime and business continuity: Features like vMotion and High Availability ensure continuous operation even during hardware failure. This minimizes downtime and protects your critical business applications.

How Does VMware Work?

At the heart of VMware's virtualization technology is a component called a hypervisor. This thin layer of software sits directly on top of the physical server hardware, managing and allocating resources to the virtual machines. The hypervisor creates and manages the virtual hardware for each VM, including virtual CPUs, memory, storage, and network interfaces.

This allows multiple VMs to share the physical resources without interfering with each other. VMware offers different types of hypervisors, such as ESXi, a bare-metal hypervisor installed directly on the server, and Workstation, a hosted hypervisor that runs on top of an existing operating system.

Impact of Broadcom's Acquisition

In November 2023, semiconductor giant Broadcom finalized its acquisition of VMware for a staggering $69 billion. This monumental deal brought about a significant shift in the virtualization landscape, raising questions and concerns about the future of VMware's products, pricing, and overall strategy. 

Broadcom, known primarily for its hardware and semiconductor business, entered the software arena with this acquisition, aiming to leverage VMware's expertise and market dominance in virtualization and cloud computing.

One of the most notable changes following the acquisition is VMware's move away from its traditional perpetual licensing model towards a subscription-based approach. This transition means customers now pay recurring fees for access to VMware's software rather than owning licenses outright. This has led to concerns about increased costs, particularly for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.

In addition to the licensing changes, Broadcom has also introduced new packaging for VMware's products. This includes bundling core offerings like vSphere and vSAN into broader suites like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

While this bundling strategy may simplify purchasing for some customers, it can also increase costs for those who only need specific components.

VMware Technologies and Tools

Virtualization

VMware hypervisor

The hypervisor is the key component that makes virtualization possible. It's a thin layer of software that sits directly on the server hardware, managing and allocating resources to the virtual machines. The hypervisor creates and manages the virtual hardware for each VM, including virtual CPUs, memory, storage, and network interfaces. This allows multiple VMs to share the physical resources without interfering with each other, ensuring isolation and performance.

VMware ESX

VMware ESX, now known as ESXi, is a bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto the physical server.

This means it doesn't require an underlying operating system to function. ESXi is renowned for its small footprint, enhanced security, and high performance. It provides a robust and efficient platform for running virtual machines, making it a popular choice for enterprise-grade virtualization deployments.

Data center and cloud infrastructure

VMware provides a comprehensive suite of solutions for managing data center and cloud infrastructure, enabling businesses to build efficient, scalable, and resilient environments. Here are some key components:

vSphere Client

The vSphere Client serves as the primary interface for managing your VMware environment. It provides a centralized console for controlling and monitoring ESXi hosts, virtual machines, and other components of your infrastructure. With the vSphere Client, you can perform various tasks, such as provisioning VMs, configuring networking, and monitoring resource usage.

ESXi

As mentioned earlier, ESXi is VMware's flagship hypervisor. It's a bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto your physical servers, providing a robust and efficient platform for running virtual machines. ESXi is known for its high performance, security, and reliability, making it a cornerstone of VMware's data center solutions.

vCenter Server

vCenter Server acts as the central management hub for your VMware environment. It allows you to manage multiple ESXi hosts and their virtual machines from one location.

vCenter provides advanced capabilities such as centralized resource management, high availability, and disaster recovery. It also enables you to monitor performance, automate tasks, and enforce security policies across your entire infrastructure.

vMotion

vMotion is a key feature of vSphere that enables live migration of virtual machines between ESXi hosts without any downtime. This means you can move a running VM from one physical server to another without disrupting applications or services.

vMotion provides maintenance, resource optimization, and load balancing flexibility, ensuring continuous availability for your critical workloads.

Virtual networking and security

VMware recognizes that networking and security are critical components of any modern IT infrastructure. To address these needs, they offer NSX, a powerful network virtualization and security platform that supports a zero-trust model.

NSX allows you to create and manage virtual networks entirely in software, enabling micro-segmentation to isolate workloads and microservices and enhance security.

This provides incredible flexibility and agility, enabling you to provision and reconfigure networks in seconds. NSX reproduces the entire network model in software, including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, and VPNs

Storage and availability

VMware offers a range of solutions to address the critical needs of storage and availability in virtualized environments. These solutions ensure that your data is stored efficiently, protected from loss, and readily available to your applications and users.

VMware vSAN

vSAN is VMware's software-defined storage solution. It pools together the local storage devices of your ESXi hosts to create a shared, distributed storage cluster. This eliminates the need for dedicated storage arrays, simplifies storage management, and reduces costs. vSAN delivers high performance, scalability, and resilience, making it an ideal storage solution for virtual machines and modern applications.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

SRM is a disaster recovery solution that enables you to orchestrate and automate the recovery of your virtual machines in the event of a disaster. It replicates your VMs to a secondary site and provides automated failover capabilities, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. SRM simplifies disaster recovery planning and testing, giving you confidence in recovering from unexpected events.

Together, vSAN and SRM provide a comprehensive approach to storage and availability. vSAN ensures that your data is stored efficiently and reliably, while SRM protects your critical applications and data from disruptions, ensuring business continuity and resilience.

Cloud Management Platform

VMware vRealize Suite is a comprehensive cloud management platform that empowers you to manage your hybrid cloud environment effectively. It provides a suite of automation, operations, and log analytics tools, enabling you to streamline IT processes, optimize resource utilization, and gain valuable insights into your infrastructure. vRealize Suite helps you automate the deployment and management of applications and infrastructure across private, public, and hybrid clouds, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

Modern application management

Tanzu is VMware's portfolio of solutions designed to help you build, run, and manage modern applications. It provides a comprehensive platform for containerization, Kubernetes orchestration, and application lifecycle management. Tanzu enables you to embrace cloud-native development practices, accelerate application delivery, and improve developer productivity.

Virtual desktop solutions

VMware offers a range of virtual desktop solutions that enable you to deliver virtual desktops and applications to users anywhere, anytime, and on any device – aiding enterprise mobility management. These solutions enhance security, simplify management, and provide a consistent user experience across devices.

VMware Horizon

VMware Horizon is a comprehensive platform for delivering virtual desktops and applications. It allows you to create a centralized pool of virtual desktops that users can access from their laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Horizon provides a secure and consistent user experience, regardless of the device or location. It offers features such as instant clones, app volumes, and blast extreme protocol to optimize performance and reduce storage costs.

VMware Workstation

While often used by developers and for testing environments, VMware Workstation also provides virtual desktop solutions. It allows you to run multiple operating systems as virtual machines on a single physical computer. This can be useful for providing access to legacy applications or for creating isolated environments for specific tasks. Workstation provides a robust and feature-rich platform for running virtual machines on your desktop.

Both Horizon and Workstation offer valuable tools for delivering virtual desktop solutions. Horizon focuses on enterprise-grade deployments, providing scalability, security, and centralized management. On the other hand, workstation caters to individual users and smaller deployments, offering flexibility and ease of use.

Clustering technologies

VMware provides a powerful set of clustering technologies that enhance your virtualized environment's availability, performance, and manageability. These technologies work together to ensure that your applications and services remain accessible even in the event of hardware failures or resource constraints.

VMware High Availability (HA)

VMware HA provides high availability for your virtual machines by automatically restarting them on other hosts in the cluster if a host fails. HA constantly monitors the health of your ESXi hosts and detects failures. HA automatically restarts the affected VMs on other available hosts when a failure occurs, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

VMware FT provides continuous availability for your most critical applications by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine on another host in the cluster. FT continuously replicates the state of the primary VM to the secondary VM, ensuring that there is no data loss or downtime in the event of a host failure. If the primary host fails, the secondary VM immediately takes over, providing seamless continuity.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware DRS enables dynamic resource management and load balancing across your cluster. DRS continuously monitors the resource usage of your VMs and automatically migrates them between hosts to ensure optimal performance and resource utilization. This helps to prevent resource contention and ensures that your applications have the resources they need to perform effectively.

Alternative virtualization technologies

While VMware dominates the virtualization market, it's not the only player in the field. Several alternative virtualization technologies exist, each with its own strengths and focus.  Microsoft's Hyper-V, included with Windows Server, offers a robust virtualization platform with strong integration into the Microsoft ecosystem. 

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is an open-source hypervisor popular in Linux environments. It is known for its performance and flexibility. 

Citrix Hypervisor, formerly XenServer, provides a strong foundation for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments and cloud environments. Additionally, containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, while not strictly virtualization in the same sense as VMware, offer alternative approaches to application deployment and resource management, further diversifying the landscape