Virtualization and VMware vSphere Components

VMware software products virtualize computing resources, including CPU, memory, storage, and networks. Virtualization provides an abstraction layer between computing resources, physical storage, and networking hardware, and the applications that use the resources.

VMware vSphere includes ESXi, vCenter Server, and several additional server products. The base products support running and managing virtual machines. With additional licenses, you can take advantage of the vSphere distributed resource management (DRS), disaster recovery, and high availability (HA) features.

■	The ESXi hypervisor is capable of supporting multiple virtual machines and other virtual components, such as storage and networks.

■	vCenter Server provides central management for all of the components of a virtualized environment, including multiple ESX/ESXi host systems, clusters, storage, and distributed virtual switches. It is distributed in two package formats:

■	Windows-based software services.

■	Linux-based VMware vCenter Server Appliance.

■

vSphere Web Client is a GUI to manage vSphere. It provides the UI platform that you use to integrate your solution with vSphere. The vSphere Web Client also includes a server-side Java platform. You can develop Java plugins that use the vSphere Web Services SDK to communicate with vSphere servers. See the vSphere Web Client SDK for more information about building UI and service plugins for the vSphere Web Client.

For more information about ESXi and vCenter Server, see the VMware vSphere documentation page on the VMware Web site. If you are new to VMware vSphere or new to the vSphere Web Services SDK, see one of these vSphere administrator documents for background information about vSphere:

■	vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide

■	vCenter Server and Host Management Guide

■	vSphere Resource Management Guide