what is VMware?

[duquer]

what is VMware? and what does it do?

[Tony Flury]

VMware (Virtual Machine S/w) allows you to run for one operating systems with in another : for instance Windows within a linux installation, and therefore run MS Windows compliant applications without needing to reboot.

[hyper_ch]

Wikipedia is a great resource that tells you a lot of many different things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware

[falkTX]

VMware is shareware.
If you're interested on running Virtual Machines, VirtualBox is the best solution, although doesn't have some VMware features like 3D Accelerated graphics.
But, most of the time, VirtualBox does everything you need

[bodhi.zazen]

I moved your thread to the virtualization section.

Look at the stickies for additional information.

Although the VirtualBox folks are quite vocal, the bottom line is each virtualization (VMWare, VBox, KVM, XEN, OpenVZ, etc) has advantages and disadvantages.