What is vSphere in VMware Virtualization Concepts ?

What is vSphere in  VMware Virtualization Concepts?

In order to go from a hardware-driven data center to a virtual data center, all three components of the data center, servers, network, and storage, are virtualized. However, virtualizing a data center is not as simple as installing a hypervisor and calling it a day. This is mainly because data centers have more components and devices and need more precise monitoring tools than a computer.

VMware started out its journey by developing a hypervisor to virtualize compute platforms but has since grown its virtualization capacity and developed VMware vSphere, which is a suite of virtualization technology designed for larger enterprise data management.

 

VMware creates many products for virtualization that are part of the vSphere suite. Each of the products creates a virtual solution for efficiency issues found in a certain component of a data center, like storage, applications, or networks. These products will be discussed throughout this chapter in accordance with the type of data center component they correspond to. However, it is not practical to discuss vSphere without first introducing the four main components that, essentially, makeup vSphere:

1. ESXi - VMware’s Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor
2. vCenter - vSphere’s management layer
3. vSphere Client - A program that configures the vCenter, host, and operates its virtual machines.
4. vSphere Host Client - A program that only configures the host and operates its virtual machines.

 

Note

Just like the original virtualization model, the hypervisor is the first layer of virtualization; this does not change when referring to data centers just because there are other components involved. A server is the hardware platform on which the ESXi hypervisor can be installed. The ‘ESXi server’ now becomes the host for virtual machines.