This entire course is about being aware, so that is why let's take a few minutes and spend some time to understand, what is VMware?. VMware Incorporation is an American publicly traded software company from California USA. It provides cloud computing and virtualization software and services.
So in this course, we are covering virtualization software. This one, it also had cloud computing, which is another topic of its own. And they also provide services, meaning once you run their software in your company, you could buy their services as well as professional services from them. It was VMware was one of the first commercially successful companies to virtualize the 86 architecture in 1998. Yes, they are one of the first pioneers who actually virtualize the 86 architecture.
Now, let's talk about the market here. VMware has proximately 80 percent of the virtualization market here. It means that there are so many other companies that actually provide you the virtualization software. There's Microsoft and there is Red Hat. There's Oracle. But most of the market share has been captured by VMware. So it's great news for those people who actually want to switch their careers to VMware. Then let's go to its name, Vean, where it has a vote of its own, so the Veum was the best thing I like about it, its name especially, and they have actually what they did is they combined the hardware and software, both terms, and they came up with the idea where hardware is something that you could touch software, something that runs on top of the hardware that you cannot touch and the viewers combine of both. So what they did is they gave it a name, a virtual machine, where?
There is two main virtualization software, by the way, VMware has a lot of different products, but we are covering the main virtualization software. One is called Rehame, where a workstation player, and by the way, that is something we will cover later on. You will learn about the VMware workstation player as well. It's software that runs over an operating system. Well, that really means you have a physical machine, a laptop or desktop, for example, and you run your Windows operating system on it, or Mac or Linux, whatever the operating system you run on, then you could actually install the VMware workstation player on top of your existing operating system and create additional virtual machines.
These frameworks in a player are mostly used in a kind of lab environment, or if you are in an educational environment and you want to teach, or if you are setting up a lab in your home environment, the VMware workstation player is the way to go. Then comes the next software, which is the corporate-level software. It's called VMware Hypervisor. VMware has a hypervisor and they call it SSI, which we will cover later on. Once again, it's a bare metal hypervisor that runs over hardware without having any operating system on it. So it means you get a new physical server from HP, Dell, UCS, Cisco, or wherever you get it from. It does not have any operating system. So this hypervisor accesses its own operating system.
You install it on the physical bare metal server and then you run the virtual machine on it. You don't need any existing operating system for it. So keep this two virtualization software in your mind and we will cover them later on.