VirtualGL originated in 2003 in the oil & gas industry, which visualizes seismic datasets so large that transmitting them over a typical LAN was untenable. Thus, a remote display environment with server-side GPU-accelerated OpenGL rendering capabilities was a necessity rather than a luxury, and VirtualGL was born out of the need to add such capabilities to existing remote display software. Sun Microsystems sold VirtualGL as part of its Sun Shared Visualization product, which also targeted large-scale visualization applications, from 2005-2009 before discontinuing the product. More recently, organizations have discovered the value, both in terms of manageability and reduced hardware costs, of moving complex technical computing applications into the "cold room" and using VirtualGL, along with a high-speed X proxy such as TurboVNC, to remotely display those applications with workstation-like levels of performance. The background article and User's Guide provide more details about VirtualGL's design, operation, and unique features.

Since 2009, VirtualGL has been sustained solely through patronage and funded development. However, this often requires a delicate balancing act: keeping the project moving forward so it can remain relevant, remain responsive to the user community, and provide a timely return on investment for funded development sponsors, while also keeping the project moving forward in a way that doesn't require the maintainer to eat labor cost or borrow against expected future funding (which sometimes doesn't arrive) in order to finish a strategically important feature or release. Developing VirtualGL independently ensures that it can remain community-focused and free of any one organization’s agenda, but it also requires continuous funding, which has historically not been easy to secure.

All sponsorship money goes directly toward funding the labor necessary to maintain VirtualGL, support the user community, and implement bug fixes and strategically important features.