VMware vSphere Environment Overview

The VMware vSphere environment makes it possible to manage disparate physical infrastructure in a datacenter as virtual pools of resources (processors, memory, storage, and networking).

The vSphere environment is made up of a number of software component layers and VMware applications as shown in the illustration. There are many VMware applications you can add to the vSphere environment to provide virtual machine (VM) and disk migration, load balancing, fault tolerance, high availability, backups, and distributed networking.

Each physical host in a vSphere environment runs the VMware ESX hypervisor software to execute a number of VMs. The hypervisor software provides a layer in the physical host upon which the VMs are created. Each VM can run a different operating system and can contain one or more applications. The resources from the physical hardware in the vSphere environment are aggregated into pools of functional resources. These functional resources can be allocated (or assigned) to specific VMs and applications as needed. The following figure illustrates the VMware vSphere environment.

Figure 1 VMware vSphere environment  

Legend

1 VMs	4 Datacenter
2 Virtualization layer	5 vCenter Server
3 Host running ESX	6 vSphere Client

The ESX hosts use their network connections to access storage and to enable remote management. While it is possible to use a vCenter Server to administer a single ESX host, it is more typical for a vCenter Server to be used to administer a set of ESX hosts and their VMs.

For information about vCenter Server and vSphere, refer to the VMware Documentation (http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/).