VMWare and VMWare server

I should buy VMWare's company share. VMWare was acquired by EMC in 2003, EMC is a company provide storage solution, I was wandering why they are buying VMWare. I think buying VMWare is a good decision, VMWare has good products, and they keep improving it.

(VMWare listed on 13 Aug, when I write this, VMWare is not listed yet)

vmware server, boot with OLPC image.

I have seen a lot of people using VMWare, especially my friends who use linux. VMWare normally refer to the software which allow you to create a virtual machine on you desktop (or server) machine, which allow you to install another operating system on your machine. VMWare will create a virtual machine with clean environment, without affecting your existing system. My friends will normally install and tried the latest Linux distribution on their windows system using VMWare, after they have finish testing it, they just remove it from their system.

I have not tried VMWare before, even I know this product for many years. VMWare is not free (at that time), and you need more resource like hard disk space, memory to run the virtual machine. VMWare release their VMWare server and VMWare player as freeware (you can download from their website here), which runs on Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X. The OS X version of VMWare called VMWare Fusion. Since WMVare products only runs on x86 base machine, VMWare Fusion only runs on OS X intel.

A few months back when I attended the Sun Tech Days, VMWare has a product which work together with a Sun Ray machine which attract me. According the representative from VMWare, you can install Windows and Solaris operating system at the server end and access it using Sun Ray thin client, I assume you can install Mac OS X and Linux operating system too. When I asked for more demos, the representative suggest visit to their customer site. Seems like VMWare does not have a good support here, they should closely with other company, not just Sun, but those company have a strong sales and support team.