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As someone who has worked in this space longer than a lot of people currently in industry have been alive, VMware predated KVM by a number of years. VMware Serv
by tristor 11d ago
As someone who has worked in this space longer than a lot of people currently in industry have been alive, VMware predated KVM by a number of years. VMware Server was released in 2001... KVM was announced in 2006 and entered the Linux kernel mainline in 2007. XenSource was formed and commercialized the Xen project with XenServer in 2006, the first open source Xen Project release was in 2003.
So for all you can say, VMware released a product to market that provided a server-based hypervisor before any of their competitors. They're not the first hypervisor, but they're the first server-based hypervisor for X86.
- jasomill 10d agoVMware was also an early leader in desktop PC virtualization. I don't recall anything comparable in the late '90s. Virtual PC existed, but IIRC it was still a Mac-only emulation product. One of the nice things about vSphere in a lab environment was the ease of moving VMs between Workstation/Fusion and ESXi, and prior to the Broadcom acquisition, pricing for the desktop and entry-level server products was reasonable, including free products, generous evaluations, and perpetual licensing with update-only subscriptions.