Why use vsphere

As defined by VMware, vSphere is an enterprise-scale virtualization platform. This solution allows you to build a reliable and resilient infrastructure to suit basically any business needs while staying on budget. One of the benefits of vSphere is its potential to reduce unplanned downtime and fully eliminate downtime required for storage and server maintenance. A comprehensive description of the vSphere functionality and features would need a separate blog post.

ESXi is a hypervisor, or a type of virtualization software that allows you to create and manage multiple virtual machines using a single physical host. ESXi is installed directly on a physical machine, meaning that it is a bare-metal hypervisor. Additionally, the architecture of ESXi allows you to speed up the process of deployment and configuration. The difference lies in the architecture.

In ESXi, the Linux-based service console has been replaced with new remote command line interfaces. In turn, a smaller footprint allows you to reduce the overall attack surface. A virtual representation of the processing and memory resources of a physical machine running ESXi is known as a host. Two or more ESXi-can be grouped into a cluster.

You can dynamically add or remove the machines running ESXi from a cluster, and partition the processing and memory resources from hosts and clusters into a hierarchy of resource pools. VMware vCenter Server allows for centralized management of your virtual infrastructure. You can control your hosts and VMs from a single console, which enhances visibility and helps with error prevention.

With this functionality, you receive an in-depth insight into the configuration of the key components of your environment. This software is a special type of software called a hypervisor. VMware vCenter is the management component of VMware vSphere, and besides acting as the centralized management point is the brains of your vSphere environment. Does VMware have additional products that touch the vSphere platform, or are even apart of it?

As of vSphere 7, there has been a huge push on Kubernetes. This enhanced functionality falls under of the scope of VMware vSphere.

Here is what you see on one of the download pages:. The vCenter Server is what makes this possible. This allows you to centrally manage the ESXi servers and form a vSphere cluster.

In addition to centralized management, vCenter provides a central management point for backup solutions to interact with all ESXi hosts from one location. VMware HA unlocks the important capability that allows you to lose an ESXi host in your vSphere ESXi cluster and still have resiliency as VMs are able to restart on a healthy host left in the vSphere cluster after a failure related to hardware or other reasons.

So, vCenter Server is an extremely important component of the vSphere ecosystem. If you truly want to be able to use all of the enterprise features that vSphere is capable of, you will need a vCenter Server. Since vSphere 6. So, the first thing you do before you can stand up a vCenter Server is load up at least a single ESXi host.

VMware does recommend separating your management cluster from your compute cluster. VMware vSphere is the entire suite of products and how these are referred to. ESXi is the core hypervisor of the solution and on top of which everything is built in a VMware infrastructure environment.