In the Maze, I Lost My Love for VMware
From Punch Cards to Cloud — Remembering the Software That Made Complexity Feel Simple
There are some technologies we use.
There are some technologies we learn.
And then there are technologies that leave a feeling behind.
For me, VMware is one of them.
Recently, while moving through today’s maze of cloud platforms, artificial intelligence, Kubernetes, GPUs, containers and agentic AI, I suddenly remembered VMware.
And I realized:
I had lost touch with a technology I once admired enormously.
Not because it disappeared.
But because the technology world around it became so busy.
VMware was sleeping in my memory.
A wonderful software baby toy.
And I wanted to know what happened to it.
My journey started long before VMware
My computing journey did not begin with cloud computing.
It began in a very different world.
I remember the era of IBM, punch cards and terminals.
Computing was physical.
Machines were expensive.
Computing resources were limited.
Software and hardware had a close relationship.
The computer was the computer.
The operating system belonged to the computer.
Applications belonged to the operating environment.
Then came personal computers, networking, client-server computing, enterprise applications and the Internet.
Every generation solved some problems.
Every generation also created new ones.
And then came VMware.
The little magic of VMware Workstation
My own VMware experience was primarily with VMware Workstation.
The idea was astonishingly simple.
Run multiple operating systems on the same physical PC.
One machine.
Multiple virtual machines.
I could run different operating systems and environments without needing a separate physical computer for each one.
Today, this sounds completely normal.
At the time, it felt like magic.
It was almost like a software toy.
A physical computer became a playground.
I could create a computer inside my computer.
That is why I like the phrase “software baby toy.”
It wasn’t meant to diminish VMware.
It expresses the sense of wonder I experienced.
Sometimes the most important technologies first appear to us as toys.
The villain was complexity
The hero of this story is VMware.
But every good story needs a villain.
The villain was—and still is—
complexity.
In the early days, the complexity came from hardware and software being closely connected.
If you needed another computing environment, you often needed another machine.
If you wanted to test something, you needed another environment.
If you wanted to isolate workloads, physical infrastructure was part of the problem.
VMware introduced an abstraction.
The physical machine remained underneath.
But the user could interact with a virtual machine instead.
That small conceptual shift was enormous.
The question changed from:
“Which physical machine am I using?”
to:
“What computing environment do I need?”
The baby grew up
VMware was founded in 1998 by five engineers, and VMware Workstation 1.0 was introduced in 1999. Soon after came ESX Server, taking virtualization from the desktop into the server world.
This was the point at which my little software toy became part of a much bigger story.
VMware was no longer simply about running multiple operating systems on one PC.
It was about virtualizing the data center.
Then came technologies and capabilities that made virtualization operationally powerful:
vSphere.
vMotion.
High Availability.
DRS.
Virtual networking.
Virtual storage.
The physical server was gradually becoming less important as the primary unit of thought.
The virtual machine became the unit of computing.
That was beautiful.
VMware changed the question
Before virtualization, the conversation often began with hardware.
How many servers?
How much memory?
How much storage?
Which machine?
Where should the application run?
VMware changed the conversation.
We could start thinking about workloads.
Compute became more fluid.
Infrastructure became more abstract.
The data center increasingly began to look like software.
That was a profound change.
And then the cloud arrived
The next major abstraction was Cloud.
Instead of owning every physical infrastructure component, organizations could consume computing resources as services.
The industry moved again.
VMware moved with it.
The company expanded its vision from server virtualization into software-defined data centers, networking, storage, hybrid cloud and application platforms.
The little baby toy had become enterprise infrastructure.
Then VMware itself entered another journey
VMware went through major corporate transitions over the years—from its founding, to EMC, to Dell Technologies, and eventually back to independence before being acquired by Broadcom.
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware on November 22, 2023. Broadcom subsequently placed VMware Cloud Foundation at the center of its private and hybrid cloud strategy.
For longtime VMware admirers, this is a very different chapter.
The VMware I remember as a wonderful software toy is now part of a much larger infrastructure strategy.
And that strategy is moving again.
VMware and the AI era
The fascinating part is that VMware has not stopped evolving.
In 2026, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is positioned as an AI- and Kubernetes-native private-cloud platform for production AI workloads.
Broadcom has also introduced VMware AI Factory, describing it as a software-defined foundation for VMware Private AI Cloud, aimed at simplifying the journey from infrastructure to production AI.
There is something almost poetic about that.
VMware began by helping us separate the operating system from the physical computer.
Now it is being positioned to help enterprises manage the infrastructure beneath AI.
The technology has grown.
The world has changed.
But the underlying problem remains familiar.
The villain has changed its costume
This is the part that interests me most.
The old villain was:
Hardware + Operating System complexity
The new villain is:
Cloud + Containers + Kubernetes + APIs + GPUs + AI Models + Agents + Security + Orchestration
We have moved from physical complexity to software complexity.
The machines have become more powerful.
The abstractions have become more sophisticated.
But complexity keeps returning.
Perhaps that is one of the great laws of technology:
Every time we solve one layer of complexity, the next layer appears.
And that is why I still appreciate VMware.
VMware did not eliminate complexity.
It hid complexity behind an abstraction that people could understand and use.
That is a much more profound achievement.
Maybe that is VMware’s real legacy
VMware’s greatest contribution may not be any single product.
It may be the idea that infrastructure does not have to look like the hardware underneath it.
One physical computer can look like many computers.
Many physical servers can look like one resource pool.
A data center can look like software.
And perhaps today’s AI infrastructure will require the same kind of thinking.
We are again surrounded by complexity.
Maybe we need another generation of abstraction.
Maybe the next “VMware moment” is already happening.
I lost VMware in the maze
My journey started with punch cards.
I travelled through IBM systems, terminals, PCs, enterprise applications, the Internet, virtualization, cloud and now Generative AI and Agentic AI.
Somewhere along the way, I lost VMware.
But perhaps I didn’t really lose it.
I simply moved into another maze.
And when I looked back, I remembered that wonderful little software baby toy.
The one that made one physical computer behave like many.
The one that made me feel that computing did not always have to be limited by what I could see physically.
The one that quietly taught me a lesson I still find relevant today:
Technology does not always defeat complexity by making things simpler underneath.
Sometimes it defeats complexity by giving us a better way to think about it.
That is what VMware gave me.
And that is why, after all these years, I still have a special place for VMware in my memory.
From punch cards to cloud.
From VMware to AI.
What a journey.