VMware has established itself as a pioneer with a suite of powerful tools designed to streamline and optimize data center operations. Three key components of VMware's ecosystem are vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter. While these terms might seem similar, they serve distinct roles within the virtualization landscape. Now that we know what the ESXi and vCenter is, let's understand the difference between these components.
People who are new to this mostly get confused with VMware vSphere and its components. Let's try to understand the VMware's terminology of it's core components. VMware Inc. is a software company that develops many suites of software products specially for providing various virtualization solutions.
VMware vSphere is a suite of virtualization applications that includes ESXi and vCenter Server. vSphere is like Microsoft Office suite which has many software's like MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access and so on. vSphere is not a particular software that you can install and use, 'it is just a package name which has other sub components'.
vSphere includes the following components in addition to the ESXi host and vSphere Client:
VMware vCenter Server
VMware vCenter server is a piece of software which allows centralized management of the whole virtual infrastructure. vCenter server can be installed on Windows, but also deployed as a virtual appliance (pre-configured VM) with a Photon OS (Linux). Newer versions of vCenter servers comes with virtual appliances only.
vCenter Server allows the use of advanced vSphere features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, and vSphere Storage vMotion. The vSphere Web Client
The vSphere Web Client is the interface to vCenter Server and multi-host environments. It also provides console access to virtual machines. The vSphere Web Client lets you perform all administrative tasks by using an in-browser interface.
Datacenter
A datacenter is a structure under which you add hosts and their associated virtual machines to the inventory.
ESXi Host
A host is a computer that uses ESXi virtualization software to run virtual machines. Hosts provide CPU and memory resources, access to storage, and network connectivity for virtual machines that reside on them.
Virtual Machine
A virtual machine is a software computer that, like a physical computer, runs an operating system and applications. Multiple virtual machines can run on the same host at the same time.
vSphere suite
In short, vSphere is a product suite, ESXi is a hypervisor installed on a physical machine. vSphere Client is installed on laptop or desktop PC and is used to access ESXi Server to install and manage virtual machines on ESXi server. vCenter Server is installed as virtual machine on top of ESXi server. Or it can also be installed on different standalone physical server.
Newer version of vCenter/ESXi does not support the vSphere Client usually called as Thick Client.
In the world of virtualization and cloud computing, vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter play distinct but interrelated roles. vSphere is the comprehensive virtualization platform, ESXi is the hypervisor that directly interacts with hardware, and vCenter is the central management hub that orchestrates and oversees virtualized resources. Together, these components form a robust ecosystem that empowers organizations to achieve greater efficiency, flexibility, and scalability in their IT operations.
Hope you've enjoyed this article. We will discuss about new vSphere Client(HTML 5), Web Client and it's features in another post.
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