VMware was founded in 1998 to bring virtualization to ordinary x86 computers. The company grew directly out of academic research at Stanford University. Mendel Rosenblum’s faculty page states that he is “a co-founder of VMware Inc” and served “as the Chief Scientist of VMware for the company’s first 10 years,” where he “helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms,” and that “VMware’s technical approach grew out of the Disco research project at Stanford University, led by Mendel Rosenblum.”
That research was published in 1997 as “Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors” by Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, and Mendel Rosenblum of the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford. The paper described a virtual machine monitor, a thin software layer between the hardware and multiple virtual machines, each running an independent operating system. The same people carried that idea from research prototype into a commercial product.
The breakthrough VMware delivered was making this work on inexpensive, mass-market x86 hardware rather than on specialized mainframes or large multiprocessors. Once a single physical server could safely run many isolated virtual machines, organizations could consolidate workloads onto far fewer machines, raising utilization and cutting cost.
VMware’s product line later split along the lines its own engineers described. As a VMware blog post explains, a hosted product like “VMware Workstation” runs “on top of a ‘host’ OS such as Windows or Linux,” while the company’s bare-metal “ESX Server is a Type 1 hypervisor.” Server consolidation built on these hypervisors became one of the foundations on which modern cloud computing was later built.