ESX Deployment Guide
7
vSphere 4 Architecture Overview
Figure 2. vSphere Components
vSphere infrastructure consists of the following components:
•
ESX
— Allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on
a single system.
•
vCenter Server
— Runs on Windows-based operating systems and
monitors and manages Virtual Machines (VM) and copies of ESX. With
vCenter Server, you can create, start, stop, and migrate VMs across the
entire physical data center. vCenter Server is optional and is required for
advanced management capabilities such as VMware VMotion,
Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), and High Availability (HA).
PowerEdge System as
ESX Host
Storage Interconnect
Fabric
Ethernet Fabric
vCenter Server
Database
External Storage
for VMs
vSphere
Client/vSphere
CLI
License Server