The Street Buzz

VMware is going the IPO way, VMware is going to sell 33 million shares to raise up to $957 million. VMware sells virtualization software to more than 20,000 organizations.After the IPO, there will be about 375 million shares outstanding in VMware, giving it an implied market in the $10 billion range. That would make it one of the world’s largest publicly held software makers.

VMware Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of EMC Corporation, supplies proprietary virtualization software for x86-compatible computers, including VMware Workstation and the freeware VMware Server and VMware Player products. The company has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, United States, with R&D offices located in Palo Alto; in San Francisco, California; in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and in Bangalore, India. VMware software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

The name “VMware” and its branding play on the traditional interpretation of “VM” in computing circles as “virtual machine”.

VMware Workstation software consists of a virtual-machine suite for x86 and x86-64 computers. This software suite allows users to set up multiple x86 and x86-64 virtual computers and to use one or more of these virtual machines simultaneously with the hosting operating system. Each virtual machine instance can execute its own guest operating system, such as (but not limited to) Windows, Linux, and BSD variants. In simple terms, VMware Workstation allows one physical machine to run two or more operating systems simultaneously. Other VMware products help manage or migrate VMware virtual machines across multiple host-machines.

Besides bridging to existing host network adapters, CD-ROM devices, hard-disk drives, and USB devices, VMware Workstation also provides the ability to simulate some hardware. For example, it can mount an ISO file as a CD-ROM, and .vmdk files as hard disks; and can configure the network adapter driver to use network address translation (NAT) through the host machine rather than bridging through it (which would require an IP address for each guest machine on the host network).

VMware Workstation also allows the testing of LiveCDs without first burning them onto physical discs or rebooting the computer. One can also take multiple successive snapshots of an operating system running under VMware Workstation. Each snapshot allows you to roll back the virtual machine to the saved status at any time. The multiple snapshots feature makes VMware Workstation useful as a tool for sales people demonstrating complex software products, and for developers setting up virtual development environments and virtual test environments. VMware Workstation includes the ability to designate multiple virtual machines as a team, which administrators can then power on and off, suspend and resume as a single object — making it particularly useful for testing client-server environments.

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