What Is VMware? A Quick Overview
Key Points
- VMware is a publicly‑traded software company headquartered in Palo Alto that sells enterprise‑grade virtualization products, not a free or open‑source solution.
- Its core offering creates a “software‑defined data center” by abstracting physical compute, storage, and network resources into virtualized pools.
- The compute layer is virtualized with vSphere (formerly ESXi), allowing multiple virtual machines to run on each physical server.
- Storage virtualization is provided by vSAN, which aggregates physical disks into a shared, software‑defined storage pool.
- Network virtualization is handled by NSX, enabling flexible, software‑defined networking for the virtual machines across the data center.
Full Transcript
# What Is VMware? A Quick Overview **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPNCp9AV-vA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPNCp9AV-vA) **Duration:** 00:06:46 ## Summary - VMware is a publicly‑traded software company headquartered in Palo Alto that sells enterprise‑grade virtualization products, not a free or open‑source solution. - Its core offering creates a “software‑defined data center” by abstracting physical compute, storage, and network resources into virtualized pools. - The compute layer is virtualized with vSphere (formerly ESXi), allowing multiple virtual machines to run on each physical server. - Storage virtualization is provided by vSAN, which aggregates physical disks into a shared, software‑defined storage pool. - Network virtualization is handled by NSX, enabling flexible, software‑defined networking for the virtual machines across the data center. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPNCp9AV-vA&t=0s) **What Is VMware? Explained** - Bradley Knapp of IBM describes VMware as a publicly traded Palo Alto company that sells enterprise‑grade virtualization software, enabling businesses to run multiple virtual machines on physical servers for more efficient resource use. ## Full Transcript
hi there and thanks so much for joining
us today my name is bradley knapp and
i'm with ibm and we're answering your
basic intro to computing questions and
basic questions about cloud computing
and the question that i'm here to talk
with you about today is one that we get
on a pretty regular basis from young
companies startup companies college
students and folks like that and it's
we see all the time about vmware
what is vmware
and so this is a topic
that is one that guest asks a lot right
it's one that we spent a lot of time
talking about vmware is a software
company headquartered out in palo alto
california that has software that allows
for virtualization of almost every
function of computing into what they
describe as a software defined data
center now that is a million different
buzzwords don't worry about it we're
going to get into the details but the
important thing to understand is vmware
is a standalone company they're publicly
traded they sell their software this is
not free and open source it's available
for sale
and it is enterprise grade it is
designed for enterprise grade
virtualization if you're not sure about
virtualization or the components of that
please check out the other videos on the
channel but with that let's jump right
in here so
imagine if you will you are a company
and you have a large pool
of physical servers compute resources
sitting in a data center and you want to
get more efficient use out of them well
the way to do that is to virtualize them
carve them up into smaller pieces and
then use those pieces to run whatever
workload you need so starting off our
stack here
we're going to have our physical servers
and i'm just going to make oh i don't
know
six of them right do a little s in here
s s s s
this is physical hardware right
and so we've said all right we want to
be more efficient with that physical
hardware so now
this is when we start installing the
vmware software the first three pieces
and these are the most important ones
are going to be the three layers that
sit on top
that virtualize our is solutions right
so that first piece is going to be
virtualizing the compute piece
this used to be called
esxi and now it's called vsphere
right so vsphere
is what is going to virtualize the
compute the compute piece
next as we move up the stack is the
storage piece
so storage how are we going to
virtualize that storage layer well we're
going to use software called vsan
and then the third piece of our isp
pyramid right is going to be network how
do we virtualize network well you
virtualize network with the vmware
product called
nsx
so
using these three things together we
have a pool of compute resources and
we're going to be able to divide that
pool up into virtual servers or virtual
instances this is our software defined
data center right compute storage
network and so we are then going to be
able to provision
virtual servers
and these virtual servers are only
pieces of some of the underlying
physical machines and inside this
virtual server
right you've got your operating system
and then on top of it you've got your
application stack
well what if you're not doing a virtual
server based environment what if this
vmware cluster is going to be used for
containers same general idea right
so in that case you're going to have
your container kernel
right your linux kernel
and then on top of that container kernel
you're going to have your millions of
little containers that you're creating
and destroying and creating and
destroying and creating and destroying
so on and so forth
and then the piece that i haven't talked
about yet and this is maybe some of
vmware's best sauce their magic sauce is
how do you control all this stuff
and so that is why running across the
side here
we have v center
vcenter is the control software that
controls all of these things it's got a
wonderful little web portal you can log
into it create and destroy create and
destroy as much as you want now
this software defined data center this
is the infrastructure level component
and while it is incredibly important
this is 2021 this is the modern world
and we can't just have this in the
abstract we need more and so let's talk
a little bit over here about what's
called the v realize suite v realize is
a bunch of different solutions that make
running the cloud piece over here the
infrastructure piece over here much
simpler so
let's see here v-r-e-a-l-i-z-e
so v realize the two pieces that get
talked about the most often are going to
be vra
and vro that's v realize automation and
v realize orchestration or vla vrealize
operations depending on who you ask
so you've got your vra
and your v
r o
the automation piece is about
automatically standing up and standing
down virtual servers about automatically
standing up and standing down containers
automatically doing load balancing
automatically shifting virtual servers
from one physical host to another
because they need to resize it automatic
resizing and so on and so forth it is
your automation engine
vro if you realize operations is all of
the other components that are not
operating i'm sorry that are not
automating but aren't monitoring and
operating right you've got lots of nifty
little software tidbits in here to keep
track of your infrastructure environment
in real time other components that live
within this vrealize world
you've got oh monitoring you've got
logging you've got security components
and then you've got analytics and
analytics visualization engine
again this is the software stack that
you need in order to run the physical
hardware in virtual hardware that at the
end forms the core of those enterprise
workloads
so hopefully you've learned a little bit
about what vmware is if you'd like to
learn even more of course anybody at ibm
would be happy to talk with you about it
you can obviously reach out to us in the
comments
or get in touch with your ibm team
directly and we'll be happy to say how
can we
work with you to integrate vmware to
make your world better