This is for Virtual Machine (hence VM).
This is a new direction that a layer will be insert between the OS and the physical hardware.
VMWare will create virtual machine (or several virtual machines) on top of the physical layer of the computer. In theory, each virtual machine will have their own OS running applications.
The principle of VM and the use of it can be a full size text book.
A simple example, if you have a Intel server with 2 CPUs.
You can run VMWare on the server, creates 4x Intel sessions running 2x Windows 2003 servers, 1x Windows NT server for old applications and 1x Linux server. The actual physical 2x CPUs and memory are only supplying "resources" to these 4 VMs. If in case any one physical CPU will crash or fail, all 4x VM will still running but of course much slower.
This is only a very simple example. The true value of VM is on very large systems, e.g. on the HP SUperDome running many domains and also can use VM to turn it into a fault-tolarence machine.
[ 本帖最後由 BenChek 於 2006-12-4 07:31 AM 編輯 ]