VMware Open Source Program

VMware has a long history of support for open source software in its products. In addition to collaborating with the open source community, VMware works closely with major Linux vendors to ensure high quality support for Linux guest operating systems running on VMware hypervisors. As an active participant in the open source community VMware has open sourced the VMware Tools as the Open Virtual Machine Tools project, contributed the VMI (Virtual Machine Interface) paravirtualization code under the GPL, collaborated with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of paravirt-ops, and sponsored OSDL's DCL F2F

Support for Linux has been of primary importance starting with the very first product, VMware for Linux 1.0, which only ran on Linux (kernel versions 2.0 or 2.2), and included support for Red Hat 5 , SuSE 6, and Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 as guest operating systems.

Over the years VMware has continued to provide top tier support for Linux in its products, and has added support for FreeBSD, and a wide variety of Linux distributions. Currently, VMware supports over 60 versions of Linux and other open source based OSs across its product line, from a wide variety of vendors including Ubuntu, SuSE, Novell, Red Hat, and Mandriva.

In December 2005 VMware introduced the VMware Player, a free virtualization product targeted at end users. There have been over 1 million downloads of the Linux version of the VMware Player since then. The Linux version of VMware's entry level server virtualization offering, VMware Server, has had approximately 750,000 downloads to date.

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