Components and Services of the vSphere Environment
Starting with vSphere 7.0, the installation and setup of vSphere is simplified to the deployment and upgrade of vCenter Server. vCenter Server is a preconfigured virtual machine optimized for running the vCenter Server service and the vCenter Server components. vCenter Server service acts as a central administrator for ESXi hosts.
Authentication Services Installed with vCenter Server
The vCenter Server group of authentication services includes vCenter Single Sign-On, License Service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate Authority. The services installed with the vCenter Server appliance are common to the entire virtual environment. A vCenter Server can be connected to one or more vCenter Server instances. In a deployment that consists of more than one vCenter Server, the data of each service is replicated across all vCenter Server instances.
In the client applications that use the vSphere Automation API, you use the vCenter Single Sign-On and the Lookup Service on the vCenter Server 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 API endpoint. You send credentials to the vCenter Single Sign-On service and receive a SAML token that you use to retrieve a session ID from the vSphere Automation API endpoint. Alternatively, you can access the vSphere Automation APIs in a sessionless manner. You must simply include the SAML token in every request that you issue to the vSphere Automation API endpoint.
- Service Discovery
- You use the Lookup Service to retrieve the endpoint URL for the vCenter Single Sign-On service on the vCenter Server, the location of the vCenter Server instances, and the vSphere Automation API endpoint.
Components Installed with vCenter Server
vCenter Server is a central administration point for ESXi hosts. The group of components installed when you install vCenter Server include the vCenter Server service, vSphere Client, VMware vSphere® Auto Deploy™, VMware vSphere® ESXi™ Dump Collector, VMware vSphere® Syslog Collector, and vSphere Lifecycle Manager service.
You can use the vSphere Automation API endpoint to access the following services running on vCenter Server.
- Content Library
- You can use content libraries to share virtual
machines, vApps, and other files, such as ISO, OVA, and text 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. Sharing
content libraries promotes consistency, compliance, efficiency, and
automation in deploying workloads at scale.
You can also create OVF and VM templates from virtual machines and vApps in hosts, resource pools, and clusters. You can then use the OVF and VM templates to deploy new virtual machines and vApps.
Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can edit the contents of a VM template. You can check out the library item that contains the VM template. After editing the VM template, check in the library item to save the changes to the virtual machine.
- Virtual Machine
- You can use the vSphere
Automation APIs to create, configure, and manage
the life cycle of virtual machines in your environment.
Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can also clone, create an instant clone, migrate, register, and unregister a virtual machine.
- vSphere Lifecycle Manager
- Starting with vSphere 7.0, the life cycle of ESXi hosts and clusters can be managed through the VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ feature. Based on the current state of the hosts in a cluster, you can easily create a desired software specification by using the contents of a software depot. Then you validate the desired software specification and you apply the specification on all hosts in the cluster.
- vSphere Tags
- With vSphere tags you can attach metadata to vSphere objects, and as a result, make it easier to filter and sort these objects. You can use the vSphere Automation APIs to automate the management of vSphere tags.
- vSphere with Kubernetes
- Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can enable vSphere with Kubernetes on an existing vSphere cluster in your environment. Create and configure namespaces on the Supervisor Clusters to run Kubernetes workloads in dedicated resource pools.