Managed and Standalone ESX/ESXi Hosts

You can run ESX/ESXi as a managed or standalone ESX/ESXi host.

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Standalone ESX/ESXi hosts are standalone hosts with limited capabilities. The inventory of a standalone host can support multiple virtual machines and multiple resource pools, but it contains a single default datacenter and a single root folder. The default datacenter and root folder are not visible in the vSphere Client, but they exist in the inventory of a standalone host and they are visible in the MOB.

■	Managed ESX/ESXi hosts have been added to the vCenter Server inventory. Available features depend on the licenses available for that host. For example, you can configure two or more hosts for VMware DRS resource management or VMware HA failover protection.

Standalone ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server Inventories summarizes the differences between the number of objects that an inventory can contain. See also ESXi Inventory Hierarchy and vCenter Server Inventory Hierarchy.

Standalone ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server Inventories 

ManagedEntity Subtype	ESX/ESXi Inventory	vCenter Server Inventory
ClusterComputeResource	None.	Multiple instances supported.
ComputeResource	Exactly one only.	Multiple instances supported.
Datacenter	Exactly one only. Cannot be destroyed. Transparent.	Multiple instances supported.
Datastore	Multiple instances supported.	Multiple instances supported.
DistributedVirtualSwitch	Multiple instances supported.	Multiple instances supported.
Folder	Exactly one only. Cannot be destroyed. Transparent.	Multiple instances supported.
HostSystem	Exactly one only.	Multiple instances supported.
Network	Multiple instances supported.	Multiple instances supported.
ResourcePool	Multiple instances supported.	Multiple instances supported.
VirtualApp	None.	Multiple instances supported.
VirtualMachine	Multiple instances supported.	Multiple instances supported.