VMware made its name in the server virtualization market, but the company has expanded into many different areas since its founding in 1998. Today there are VMware products for management, desktop virtualization, cloud computing and even hosted email.
The flagship VMware products are vSphere,
Requires Free Membership to View
its server virtualization platform, and vCenter Server, its
management console. (The current version is vSphere 4.1.)
VSphere supports the ESX and ESXi hypervisors, and there are several other point products in the
vCenter family. For desktop and application virtualization, the primary VMware products are View and ThinApp. And for cloud
computing, there’s vCloud Director, which is designed to bridge private and public cloud
infrastructures.
This guide contains more information on specific VMware products and features from our VMware Super Definitions series. We’ll add more VMware products and features to this guide as more Super Definitions are published.
VMware
Player
VMware Player is a free, lightweight tool for creating, editing and running VMware VMs and virtual
appliances. Because of its small size, it can run on many desktops as well as servers. The main
uses for this VMware product are to experiment with virtualization, run incompatible legacy
applications and test new software before deploying it on a large scale. You can download VMware Player from
VMware’s website.
VMware
ThinApp
When it comes to application virtualization, VMware’s product is called ThinApp. This tool
abstracts the application from the underlying operating system and converts it into a single
executable file. A working ThinApp environment requires a minimum of three VMs: one to install and
run ThinApp itself, one to run the base OS and store the application, and another to run the
virtualized application.
VMware
vCenter Converter
VMware vCenter Converter turns physical workloads into virtual machine disk (VMDK) files. As a
physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion tool , it is designed to help jump-start virtualization
deployments. Converter can perform P2V migrations in one of two ways: hot migrations (which don’t
require any server downtime) and cold migrations (which do). This VMware product can also perform
virtual-to-virtual migrations and convert other platforms’ VMs to the VMware-compatible VMDK
format.
VMware vCenter
Server
VCenter Server is the main VMware product for managing server virtualization infrastructures. It
allows administrators to centrally manage hosts and VMs, and it provides insight into a virtual
infrastructure through a single pane of glass. For expanded management capabilities, vCenter Server
uses plug-ins that import data from third-party sources. It’s important to note that many popular
vSphere features, including vMotion and High Availability, require vCenter Server.
VMware View
VMware View is VMware’s desktop virtualization product. It takes a desktop’s operating system,
applications and settings and converts them into a virtual machine (VM) file, which is stored
centrally in the data center. VMware View then sends this data to an endpoint using an agent and
the PC-over-IP protocol. Because these virtualized desktops are VMs running on VMware hosts, they
can take advantage of other VMware products and features, such as Distributed Resource Scheduler
and vMotion.
This was first published in February 2011
Join the conversationComment
Share
Comments
Results
Contribute to the conversation