VMware has introduced a broad range of products to use in virtualized environment to create a true software defined data center. Their products falls in many categories including datacenter and cloud infrastructure, infrastructure & operations management, network and security and application management etc.
Out of those VMware vSphere is the core product portfolio from VMware. Over the years vSphere has grown exponentially with products like Operations manager, Replication, data protection and NSX. Today we will discuss about two products from vSphere which common to all their licensing categories.
VMware ESXi Hypervisor
ESXi (or previously known as ESX) is the founding stone to their almost all the products. It’s a type one bare metal hypervisor and current public available release is version 6.7. ESXi hypervisor has a very minimal code base. This makes the ESXi deployment is very fast and maintenance much easy.
VMware vCenter Server
vCenter server is the centralized management software for vSphere solutions including ESXi, Replication, NSX and many others. Currently vCenter Server is offered as a windows installation and as a virtual appliance (VCSA) based on VMware’s photon OS. With the previous release (version 6.5) VMware has introduced features like vCenter HA for high availability but only for the VCSA.
Note: If you are interested to trying out VMware’s products and solutions I’d highly recommend creating a my.vmware.com account which gives access to all their products for evaluation period of 2 months.
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