VMware - bobbae/gcp GitHub Wiki
VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.
VMware's most notable products are its hypervisors. VMware became well known for its first type 2 hypervisor known as GSX. This product has since evolved into two hypervisor product lines: VMware's type 1 hypervisors running directly on hardware and their hosted type 2 hypervisors.
https://www.vmware.com/products.html
VMware environment is available also directly through the Google Cloud Console.
https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine
https://vmc.techzone.vmware.com/resource/designlet-hcx-network-extension-google-cloud-vmware-engine
These hypervisors run directly on the host's hardware to control the hardware and to manage guest operating systems. For this reason, they are sometimes called bare-metal hypervisors.
VMware ESXi runs on bare metal unlike other VMware products. It includes its own kernel. In the original VMware ESX, a Linux kernel was started first and then used to load a variety of specialized components, including ESX which served as vmkernel which is a microkernel that runs on bare computer. The vmkernel handles CPU and memory directly using scan-before-execution (SBE) and system resource allocation table (SRAT). ESX is no longer used and ESXi is used instead, which does not include Linux kernel at all.
vCenter works with ESX to enable monitoring and management of multiple ESX, ESXi and GSX servers.
Xen hypervisor handles memory management and CPU scheduling of all virtual machines. The most privileged one is called dom0 which has access to hardware. From the dom0 the hypervisor can be managed to launch unprivileged virutal machines called domU. Xen offers five approaches to run the guest operating system: hardware virtual machines (HVM), HVM with PV drivers, paravirtualization with full hardware virtualization -- HVM with PVHVM drivers -- PVHVM, PV in an HVM container -- PVH and paravirtualization -- PV.
Paravirtualization is achieved by running a modified operating system which can leverage a special hypercall ABI instead of certain architectural features for better performance.
Hyper-V implements isolation of virtual machines in terms of a partition. A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which each guest operating system executes.
z/VM is IBM's based on original VM operating systems dating back to 1960s CP/CMS and System 360. z/VM runs on IBM's Z family of computers.
VMware Workstation is a hosted hypervisor that runs on Operating Systems.
VMWare Player is a virtualization software that runs on Operating Systems and supplied free of charge for non-commercial use.
QEMU is an open source hypervisor that emulates machine's processor through binary translation and software models of various hardware devices.
VirtualBox is an open source hypervisor that can be installed on many Operating Systems.