- Display - 8.17.2.14: Vmware Inc.

(symbolic): August 17, 2002, 2:14 PM – In a cramped Palo Alto lab, a VMware engineer performs the first live migration of a running web server from one physical host to another with zero downtime. The team celebrates with pizza. They call it VMotion . This moment—8.17.2.14—is later engraved on a small plaque in VMware’s Building 1. It represents the birth of the “always-on” data center. Part II: The EMC Acquisition & Hypervisor Wars (2004–2007) In December 2003, Diane Greene received an offer she couldn’t refuse. EMC Corporation , the storage giant, acquired VMware for $635 million. Many predicted death by corporate absorption. Instead, EMC left VMware largely independent, funding its R&D aggressively.

The killer feature arrived in 2006: (VI3). It bundled ESX 3, VirtualCenter, VMotion, High Availability (HA), and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). A single admin could now manage a thousand servers as one giant pool of resources. Wall Street took notice. Server consolidation projects paid for themselves in 6–9 months. vmware inc. - display - 8.17.2.14

Each physical server—whether running Windows NT, Linux, or Novell NetWare—sat idling at 5% to 15% capacity. To run ten different applications, you needed ten different machines, each consuming power, cooling, and floor space. The industry’s solution was simply “buy more hardware.” Rosenblum and his colleagues, including Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion, asked a different question: What if one physical machine could run many operating systems at once, safely and efficiently? (symbolic): August 17, 2002, 2:14 PM – In

But VMware’s real ace was its partnership with hardware vendors. HP, Dell, Cisco, and others baked VMware into their server bundles. By 2011, over 95% of Fortune 1000 companies ran VMware. This moment—8