Components and Services of a Virtual Environment

Starting with vSphere 6.0, the deployment of the virtual environment consists of two major components that provide different sets of services, the VMware Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server. You can deploy vCenter Server with an embedded or external Platform Services Controller.

Services Installed with Platform Services Controller

The Platform Services Controller group of infrastructure services contains vCenter Single Sign-On, License Service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate Authority. The services installed with the Platform Services Controller are common to the entire virtual environment. A Platform Services Controller can be connected to one or more vCenter Server instances. In a deployment that consists of more than one Platform Services Controller, the data of each service is replicated across all Platform Services Controller instances.

In vSphere Automation API client applications, you use the vCenter Single Sign-On and the Lookup Service on the Platform Services Controller to provide a range of functionality.

Authentication and Session Management

You use the vCenter Single Sign-On service to establish an authenticated session with the vSphere Automation Endpoint. You send credentials to the vCenter Single Sign-On service and receive a SAML token that you use to obtain a session ID from the vSphere Automation Endpoint. Alternatively, you can access the vSphere Automation APIs in a sessionless manner by including the SAML token in every request that you issue to the vSphere Automation Endpoint.

Service Discovery

You use the Lookup Service to discover the endpoint URL for the vCenter Single Sign-On service on the Platform Services Controller, the location of the vCenter Server instances, and the vSphere Automation Endpoint.

Services Installed with vCenter Server

vCenter Server is a central administration point for ESXi hosts. The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, Inventory Service, vSphere^® Auto Deploy™, vSphere^® ESXi™ Dump Collector, VMware vSphere^® Syslog Collector on Windows and VMware vSphere Syslog Service for the vCenter Server Appliance.

vCenter Server also provides services that you can access through the vSphere Automation Endpoint.

Content Library Service

You can use the Content Library Service to share VM templates, vApp templates, and other files across the software-defined data center. You can create, share, and subscribe to content libraries on the same vCenter Server instance or on a remote instance. This promotes consistency, compliance, efficiency, and automation in deploying workloads at scale. By using content libraries, you can also create OVF packages from virtual machines and virtual appliances in hosts, resource pools, and clusters. You can then use the OVF packages to provision new virtual machines in hosts, resource pools, and clusters.

Tagging Service

This service supports the definition of tags that you can associate with vSphere objects or vSphere Automation resources. The vSphere Automation SDKs provide the capability to manage tags programmatically.