There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
What would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
You can do live migration like that with qemu, I do it all the time with Proxmox, which uses qemu under the hood.
You’re not wrong in 2025. But VMware was able do it in 2003.