VMware LLC is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

In 1998,[7] VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion.

[9] Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005[10] and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco).

[15][16] On July 8, 2008, after disappointing financial performance, the board of directors fired VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, who was replaced by Paul Maritz, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit.

[18] On September 10, 2008, Mendel Rosenblum, the company's co-founder, chief scientist, and the husband of Diane Greene, resigned.

[20] One result was the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch, an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.

[22] On April 12, 2011, VMware released an open-source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, as well as a hosted version of the service.

[25] In March 2013, VMware announced the corporate spin-off of Pivotal Software, with General Electric investing in the company.

Most of VMware's application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization.

[28] In January 2016, in anticipation of Dell's acquisition of EMC, VMware announced a restructuring to reduce about 800 positions, and some executives resigned.

On April 15, 2021, it was reported that Dell would spin off its remaining stake in VMware to shareholders and that the two companies would continue to operate without major changes for at least five years.

[45] Beginning in January 2022, hackers infiltrated servers using the Log4Shell vulnerability at organizations who failed to implement available patches released by VMware according to PCMag.

[46] ZDNET reported in March 2022 that hackers utilized Log4Shell on some customers' VMware servers to install backdoors and for cryptocurrency mining.

[53][54] On completion, Broadcom reorganized the company into four divisions: VMware Cloud Foundation, Tanzu, Software-Defined Edge, and Application Networking and Security,[55] and subsequently laid off over 2,800 employees.

[57] On December 13, 2023, VMware ended availability for perpetually licensed products such as vSphere and Cloud Foundation, moving exclusively to subscription-based offerings.

[61] In March 2015, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig in Hamburg, Germany against VMware for alleged violation of his copyrights in its ESXi product.

[134] The appeal was decided February 2019 and again dismissed by German court, on the basis of not meeting "procedural requirements for the burden of proof of the plaintiff.

The translated code gets stored in spare memory, typically at the end of the address space, which segmentation mechanisms can protect and make invisible.