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
vSphere 7.0

ESXi and vCenter Server
VMware vSphere is VMware's virtualization platform, which transforms data centers into

vSphere with Tanzu aggregated computing infrastructures that include CPU, storage, and networking

VMware vSAN resources. vSphere manages these infrastructures as a unified operating environment,

and provides you with the tools to administer the data centers that participate in that

vSphere Bitfusion environment.


vSphere 6.7


ESXi and vCenter Server


vSphere Update Manager


VMware vSAN


VMware AppDefense


vSphere 6.5

ESXi and vCenter Server


vSphere Update Manager


VMware Virtual SAN

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vSphere Data Protection


vSphere 6.0

ESXi and vCenter Server


vSphere Update Manager


VMware Virtual SAN

The two core components of vSphere are ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the
virtualization platform where you create and run virtual machines and virtual appliances.
vCenter Server is the service through which you manage multiple hosts connected in a
network and pool host resources.

Want to know what is in the current release of vSphere? Look at the latest vSphere
release notes.

Learn About Some of Our Features

Beginning in vSphere 7.0, you can only deploy or upgrade to vCenter Server 7.0 using
an appliance. The new vCenter Server appliance contains all the Platform Services
Controller services from earlier releases, preserving all previous functionality, including
authentication, certificate management, and licensing. All Platform Services Controller
services are consolidated into vCenter Server, simplifying deployment and
administration. As these services are now part of vCenter Server, they are no longer
described as a part of Platform Services Controller.

vSphere 7.0 introduces vSphere Lifecycle Manager, a centralized and simplified lifecycle
management mechanism for VMware ESXi 7.0 hosts. This new feature includes the
functionality that Update Manager provided in previous vSphere releases. With vSphere
Lifecycle Manager you can manage ESXi hosts by using images and baselines at the
cluster level.

Learn how to use vSphere with Tanzu to transform vSphere into a platform for running
Kubernetes workloads natively on the hypervisor layer. With this functionality, you can
enable a vSphere cluster to run Kubernetes workloads by configuring it as a Supervisor

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Cluster. Within the Supervisor Cluster, you can create resource pools, called Supervisor
Namespaces, and configure them with dedicated memory, storage, and CPU. You can
directly deploy containers natively on ESXi within a Supervisor Namespace. These
containers live within a special type of pod called a vSphere Pod. You can also leverage
the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service to easily provision Kubernetes clusters that run
within dedicated Supervisor Namespaces.

You can view available vCenter Server updates and upgrades and produce
interoperability reports about VMware products associated with vCenter Server using
Update Planner. You can also generate pre-update reports that let you make sure your
system meets the minimum software and hardware requirements for a successful
upgrade of vCenter Server. The report provides information about problems that might
prevent the completion of a software upgrade, and actions you can take to remedy
those problems.

You can use centralized license management to manage licenses for ESXi hosts,
vCenter Server, vSAN clusters, and other VMware solutions. Learn how to use the
VMware vSphere Client to manage licenses in your vCenter Server environment.

Learn how to configure networking for vSphere, including how to create vSphere
distributed switches and vSphere standard switches, monitor networks to analyze the
traffic between virtual machines (VMs) and hosts, and manage network resources.
vSphere networking is one of the most critical components in your environment, as it is
how your ESXi hosts and VMs communicate.

You can learn about vSphere storage to help you plan a storage strategy for your
virtual data center. You can also learn how to configure and use the virtualized and
software-defined storage technologies that ESXi and vCenter Server provide. vSphere
supports several storage technologies for both traditional and software-defined
storage environments.

Learn how to secure your environment using vSphere security features and best
practices to safeguard your environment from attack. vSphere provides comprehensive,
built-in security, delivering secure applications, infrastructure, data, and access.

You can provide business continuity using vCenter High Availability (vCenter HA) and
vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT). vCenter HA provides failover protection against hardware
and operating system outages within your virtualized IT environment. If there is a host
failure, Fault Tolerance provides continuous protection for a VM.

You can use resource pools, clusters, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS),
vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM), and vSphere Storage I/O Control to
manage and allocate resources for ESXi hosts and vCenter Server.

Try Our Deployment and Planning Tools

The following resources are designed to help you plan your vSphere data center
deployment, and effectively manage your vSphere environment.

vSphere Hardware and Guest Operating System Compatibility Guides. An online

reference that shows what hardware, converged systems, operating systems,
third-party applications, and VMware products are compatible with a specific
version of a VMware software product.
VMware Product Interoperability Matrices. Provides details about the compatibility
of current and earlier versions of VMware vSphere components, including ESXi,
vCenter Server, and other VMware products.
VMware Configuration Maximums. When you configure, deploy, and operate your
virtual and physical equipment, you must stay at or below the maximums
supported by your product. The limits presented in the Configuration Maximums
tool are tested limits supported by VMware.

Access Developer and Automation Documentation

VMware {code} is a website dedicated to our developer and automation community. To
learn about vSphere APIs, SDKs, and command-line interfaces, visit these VMware
{code} resources:

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VMware SDKs and APIs

VMware command-line interfaces under Automation Tools

Explore Our Videos

You can learn about deploying, managing, and administering vSphere by reading the
documentation, and by watching videos on the VMware Information Experience video
channel.

Learn More About vSphere

To learn about vSphere and data center virtualization, see the following resources.

Learn more about vSphere by visiting the vSphere Product Page.

Ask questions about vSphere by visiting the vSphere Community Forum. You can
get help, opinions, and feedback from other VMware users by participating in the
discussion forums.
Explore vSphere without having to install it using the VMware vSphere Hands-on
Labs environment.
Learn about the solutions vSphere provides to help you overcome your IT
challenges, and create a more efficient digital infrastructure by visiting Cloud
Platform Tech Zone and vSphere White Papers and Technical Notes.
Read the latest products announcements, technical articles, and operations
guidance from VMware on the vSphere Blog.
Learn about benchmarking, performance architectures, and other performance-
focused topics at the blog VMware VROOM!, maintained by VMware's
Performance Engineering team.
Visit the William Lam blog, which focuses on automation, integration, and
operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC). William Lam is a
Staff Solutions Architect working at VMware.

Use vSphere Documentation

The vSphere documents in HTML reflect the latest vSphere update release of each
major vSphere version. For example, version 7.0 contains all the updates for 7.0.x
releases. All our documentation comes in PDF format, which you can access by
selecting the Download PDF icon on any page in the HTML documentation. PDFs for
previous releases of vSphere are available for download in a ZIP archive format. The
archive can be found under the Archive Packages heading for each major version in the
table of contents on the left.

You can create custom documentation collections, containing only the content that
meets your specific information needs, using MyLibrary.

Latest Updates Most Helpful Topics

Network Ports for VMware Site Recovery Vixdisklib hangs when using SAN if the
disk size in MB is not integer (66936) |
Services, Ports, and External Interfaces
VMware KB
That the vSphere Replication Virtual
Appliance Uses Layer7 application detection of RDP/UDP
fails in NSX-v 6.4.x and NSX-T 2.4.x
Understanding the vSphere Bitfusion
(67616) | VMware KB
Configuration Files
NSX Edge deployment fails with invalid
MAC address configuration (67635) |
VMware KB
Edit the vCenter Single Sign-On Password
Policy
Assign Permissions to a User for an ESXi
Host in the VMware Host Client

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View and Edit Alarm Settings

Latest Videos

vCenter Server Command Line Clustered VMDK for WSFC with the
 Installation vSphere Client
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