Short/quick notes about VMware products : ESX, ESXi, vCenter, vSphere/client.
ESX/ESXi
- Both are hypervisor that allowsus to manage VM on physcal host.
- ESXi operates independently from general purpose OS. Thus simplifies management (Linux-based consoles), better security, and smaller footprint (32MB).
- ESX must be installed on top a general purpose OS (Windows or Linux).
- A virtual representation of the processing and memory resources of a physical machine runnign ESXi is kwnon as a host.
- Two or more ESXi can be grouped into a cluster for resource pools management.
VMware vCenter Server
- Can be installed as virtural machine on top of ESXi server.
- Allows for centralized management of all virtual infrastructure : hosts and VMs.
- Allows to optimize routine operations on large-scale infrastructure.
- Running on Photon OS, Windows OS (discontinued) or Linux-based appliance.
- Allow single sign-on, inventory (VMs, hosts, datastores, networks) search, notification, and host profile configurations.
- Scalability: run up to 2000 hosts and 35000 VMs.
- Enterprise features : vMotion, VMware High Availability, Vmware Update Manager, Vmware Distrubuted Resource Scheduler (DSR).
- RBAC, performance monitoring and
vSphere and vSphere client/HTML5
- vSphere is a suite that contains ESX, ESXi, vCenter, vSphere client, and used as a modern software-defined data center (SDDC).
- vSphere client/HTML5 - used to access ESXi (small env) and vCenter (large env) for management.
- vSphere client is replaced by HTML5-based vSphere in vSphere 6.7
Links:
- https://www.mustbegeek.com/difference-between-vsphere-esxi-and-vcenter/
- https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vmware-esxi-vs-vsphere-vs-vcenter-key-differences/