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CHAPTER 1 VMware VSphere 4 OVerView
The systems, storage, and I/O devices compatibility guides list the hardware that’s compatible
with various versions of VMware ESX and ESXi. The guest and host operating system compatibil-
ity guides list the operating systems supported by various VMware products such as ESX/ESXi,
Workstation, Fusion, and Server.
Summary
With the release of vSphere, VMware continues to expand the capabilities of its successful VMware
Infrastructure virtualization platform. VMware classifies the vSphere platform functionality into
three groups of services:
Infrastructure services
•u
Application services•u
Management services•u
Each of these services further comprises several components that together make vSphere a
reliable and scalable virtualization platform. Although infrastructure and application services are
part of vSphere, the management services are provided by VMware vCenter Server. In this chap-
ter, we provided a high-level overview of these services and details on the different components
that make these services. Understanding the capabilities of the underlying virtualization platform
is the key to subsequent successful application deployment. You can leverage this information
when we explain how to successfully virtualize the tier-1 Microsoft server applications in the
next chapters.
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