VMware is a virtualization and cloud computing software provider based in Palo Alto, Calif. Founded in 1998, VMware is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. EMC Corporation originally acquired VMware in 2004; EMC was later acquired by Dell Technologies in 2016. VMware bases its virtualization technologies on its bare-metal hypervisor ESX/ESXi in x86 architecture.

With VMware server virtualization, a hypervisor is installed on the physical server to allow for multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on the same physical server. Each VM can run its own operating system (OS), which means multiple OSes can run on one physical server. All the VMs on the same physical server share resources, such as networking and RAM. In 2019, VMware added support to its hypervisor to run containerized workloads in a Kubernetes cluster in a similar way. These types of workloads can be managed by the infrastructure team in the same way as virtual machines and the DevOps teams can deploy containers as they were used to.