With more than 500,000 customers globally, VMware remains a proven leader not only in virtualization but also in all technologies related to digital transformation. This year marks 20 years since the creation of VMware by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion in 1998.

VMware has always focused on virtualization and its flagship product—VMware vSphere—proves that this was the right choice. The first version of ESXi hypervisor was released in 2001 and the first version of vCenter was then released two years later in 2003.

The VMware vSphere suite includes ESXi (the evolution of ESX Server) for the virtualization layer and the vCenter Server for the management layer.

Compute virtualization is only the first step here; to move to a real cloud computing infrastructure, you will not only need to compute resource abstraction (provided by virtualization) but also operation automation and agility (both of these are only partially obtainable through virtualization). Finally, this approach should not only be applied to the compute virtualization but also to the other resources, such as storage, networking, and security.

Today, VMware products can be used to fulfill this vision. There are three infrastructure pillars that VMware virtualizes:

• Compute resources—VMware vSphere
• Storage resources—VMware vSAN
• Network resources—VMware NSX

Together, these products build a unified platform for delivering any service with unmatched performance.

In this book, we are focusing primarily on VMware vSphere, but we will also touch on vSAN and NSX. However, this won't be covered in too much detail, as we will mainly look at compute virtualization using VMware vSphere.

The digital transformation journey has four IT priorities that VMware focuses on:

• Modernizing data centers: Software-defined data center architecture to modernize existing data centers painlessly and automation to run enterprise and cloud-native workloads.
• Integrating public clouds: Provides extra agility and cross-cloud architecture. Cloud freedom brings a choice, and you can easily extend your on-premises infrastructure to include any vSphere-based-public cloud.

• Empowering the digital workspace: Introduces an exceptional mobile experience by providing users with a secure and digital workspace. VMware delivers virtualized applications and offers the ability to manage apps, access, and endpoints securely.
• Transforming security: This transformative approach to security delivers secure infrastructure, networks and applications, data, and access from end to end, securing on-premises data centers through a cloud connected to the endpoint and device.