[Shorel]

VMWare developed the first useful virtualization software and had a monopoly for years because of this.

They still have some performance advantages over all competitors.

But if you are not enterprise, I see no point in paying their prices.

As you say, free products have caught up and are just good enough.

[fulafel]

Nitpick: IBM beat VMware by some decades at "first useful virtualization software".

The VMware thing was that they figured out how to make virtualization on i386 compatible hardware hobble along despite the hardware architecture being technically unvirtualizable, using clever binary translation style tricks. Virtualization support came to x86 hardware many years later.