What are VMWare and its services?
VMWare is a technology company based in Palo Alto, California, USA. VMWare provides virtualization software. It also provides many applications to build, deploy, manage and monitor your virtual infrastructure. VMware was founded on October 26, 1998. It has been
The most popular product of VMware is VMWare ESXi. The ESXi is the bare-metal virtualization software. It means ESXi runs directly on the server hardware without using any operating system on it.
There are two types of hypervisor available in the market-1) Type 1 and 2) Type 2
ESXi is the type 1 hypervisor because it runs directly on the server hardware. VMware Player and Oracle virtual box are Type 2 because these are required operating system to run. These are called hosted hypervisors. Type 1 hypervisors are most powerful than type 1 because of capacity and feature available with Type 1 hypervisors.
There are other products comes under VMWare such as –
- VMWare vSphere Client
- VMWare vSphere Web Client
- VMWare vCenter Server
- vSan
- NSX
- vRealize Suite
- VMware Cloud Foundation
- Horizon 7
- VMWare vCenter Converter
- VMWare Site Recovery Manager
VMWare provides an interface to connect with our vCenter servers through vSphere Desktop client and vSphere Web client.
vSphere desktop client is an application that you can download and install in your system and manage your vCenter server and it’s an object from here. vSphere web client is also used for managing the virtual infrastructure. Nowadays VMWare focusing on HTM5 based web clients to manage the whole VMWare environment. The desktop client is going to retire soon as per VMWare.
VMWare vCenter server is the server where we put all our servers together and manage it. This is a small image that can be easily downloaded and installed on windows based server operating system. Nowadays VMWare focusing the use of vCenter server appliance based on the photon Linux operating system.
vSAN is a storage virtualization software for VMWare. vSAN has shared storage across a virtualized environment. We will discuss more vSAN in another chapter.
NSX is the technology for networking. NSX provides extensible networking feature such as software-defined networking, manage the network infrastructure programmable fashion. This automates many things in networking.