What is VMWare? What is a Virtual Appliance? Using Virtual Appliances with Parallels? Windows on Mac Q&A - Revised March 22, 2010 To be notified of new Q&As, sign up by e-mail as well as use Twitter and Google+. If you find this page useful, please Bookmark & Share it. Thank you. What is VMWare? From the "About Us" page of the VMWare company website: VMware was founded in 1998 to bring virtual machine technology to industry-standard computers. More than 4 million users and over 20,000 corporate customers of all types and sizes use VMware software, including 99 of the Fortune 100 companies. VMWare is widely regarded to be the leader in the virtualization marketplace, and many corporate users are no doubt excited to have the company developing a virtualization solution for MacOS X. What is a "Virtual Appliance"? In the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, VMWare states that: A virtual appliance is a pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software application packaged with the operating system inside a virtual machine.
What is VMWare? VMware in simple, everyday layman's terms VMware - Defined The X86 compatible hardware of today, regardless of processor count or core count, was designed to run a single operating system. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. VMware virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that one physical computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. How Does VMware work? VMware works by loading a small, efficient operating system, or hypervisor directly on the host hardware. The client operating systems, such as Microsoft® Server 2008, Microsoft® Small Busines Server, Linux varieties, etc. are then set up as virtual machines, working directly with the VMware layer rather than with the actual hardware. How are Resources Alloctated? Processors Memory Data Storage and Drives What is Required for VMware? Benefits