Installation guide

vSphere Components 1
VMware vSphere™ includes components and operations essential for managing virtual machines. vSphere
works with several client interfaces and offers many optional components and modules, such as VMware High
Availability (HA), VMware VMotion™, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMware Update
Manager, and VMware Converter Enterprise.
vSphere allows you to treat your virtual environment objects as managed components such as virtual machines,
hosts, datacenters, resource pools, and clusters. Functional components of vSphere provide the best way to
manage each of these managed components of your virtual environment.
Finally, vSphere provides powerful administration tools through access privileges components.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n
“Components of vSphere,” on page 15
n
“vSphere Client Interfaces,” on page 17
n
“Functional Components,” on page 17
n
“Managed Components,” on page 19
n
“Access Privileges Components,” on page 21
n
“vCenter Server Plug-Ins,” on page 21
n
“vCenter Components That Require Tomcat,” on page 22
n
“Optional vCenter Server Components,” on page 23
Components of vSphere
VMware vSphere is a suite of software components for virtualization.
To run your vSphere environment, you need the following components:
ESX/ESXi
A virtualization platform used to create the virtual machines as a set of
configuration and disk files that together perform all the functions of a physical
machine.
Through ESX/ESXi, you run the virtual machines, install operating systems,
run applications, and configure the virtual machines. Configuration includes
identifying the virtual machine’s resources, such as storage devices.
The server provides bootstrapping, management, and other services that
manage your virtual machines.
VMware, Inc. 15