With the release of the ESX hypervisor in 2002, VMware transformed the IT industry. They did it again with the release of ESXi in 2007, and again with the release of vSphere in 2009. Server rooms were transformed. Ten servers became one, and months of deployment time became days.
The network side of the house has likewise undergone dramatic changes thanks to VMware, going back to the first virtual switch, vSwitch, which appeared alongside that first ESX hypervisor. Networking paradigms shifted again in 2013 when VMware introduced software-defined networking via NSX.
Today, cloud computing is reinventing the way IT works. With cloud technology, organizations have access to computing at an unimaginable scale. And with more than four billion people—half the world’s population—using the Internet, unprecedented scale is now accompanied by unprecedented reach.
