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VMware Inc. (VM Virtual Machine) a subsidiary of EMC Corporation that provides most of the software of virtualization compatible computers available for X86. Among this software include VMware Workstation, and the free VMware Server and VMware Player. VMware software can run on Windows, Linux, and platform Mac OS X running on Intel processors, under the name of VMware Fusion. The company’s corporate name is a play on words using the traditional interpretation of the acronym “VM” in computing environments as virtual machines (V irtual M achines).

VMware is a virtualization software. A virtual system is a software program that simulates a physical system (a computer hardware) with a certain hardware features. When you run the program ( simulator ) provides a runtime environment for all purposes like a physical computer (except pure physical access to hardware simulation), CPU (can be more than one), BIOS, graphics card, RAM, network card, sound system, USB, hard drive (can be more than one), etc..

A virtualizer software allows you to run (simulate) multiple computers (operating systems) within the same hardware simultaneously, allowing better use of resources. Nevertheless, when an intermediate layer between the physical system and the operating system running on hardware emulation, the execution speed of the latter is smaller, but in most cases sufficient for use in production environments.

VMware is similar to its counterpart Virtual PC, although there are differences between them that affect the way in which the software interacts with the physical system. The virtual system performance varies depending on the characteristics of the physical system in which to run, and virtual resources (CPU, RAM, etc..) Assigned to the virtual system.

While VirtualPC emulates an x86 platform, the VMware virtualized, so that most of the instructions in VMware running directly on physical hardware, while in the case of Virtual PC are translated into calls to the operating system running on the physical system.