In May 1999 VMware released VMware Workstation, the company’s first product. It let a single ordinary x86 PC run several different operating systems at the same time, each inside its own virtual machine, so a user could run Windows and Linux side by side on one physical computer.
The product came directly out of Stanford research. The 1997 Disco paper by Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, and Mendel Rosenblum had shown how a virtual machine monitor could host multiple commodity operating systems; the founders carried that approach into a shipping product for mass-market hardware. Rosenblum’s Stanford page records that he “helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms” as VMware’s chief scientist for its first decade.
Workstation was a “hosted,” or Type 2, design. A VMware blog post describing the company’s product line notes that “VMware Workstation and VMware Server” sit “on top of a host OS,” meaning the virtualization software ran as an application on Windows or Linux rather than directly on the bare hardware.
The release mattered because it proved x86 virtualization was practical on cheap, everyday machines. Developers and testers could run many environments on one desktop, and the same core technology, extended to bare-metal servers, would later enable the server consolidation and cloud platforms that followed.