Difference between vSphere, ESXi and vCenter

VMware Inc. is a software company that develops many suites of software products specially for providing various
virtualization solutions. There are many cloud products, datacenter products, desktop products and so on.
vSphere is a software suite that comes under data center product. vSphere is like Microsoft Office suite which has many
softwares like MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access and so on. Like Microsoft Office, vSphere is also a software suite that has
many software components like vCenter, ESXi, vSphere client and so on. So, the combination of all these software
components is vSphere. vSphere is not a particular software that you can install and use, “it is just a package name
which has other sub components”.
ESXi, vSphere client and vCenter are components of vSphere. ESXi server is the most important part of vSphere. ESXi is
the virtualization server. It is type 1 hypervisor. All the virtual machines or Guest OS are installed on ESXi server. To
install, manage and access those virtual servers which sit above of ESXi server, you will need other part of vSphere suit
called vSphere client or vCenter. Now, vSphere client allows administrators to connect to ESXi servers and access or
manage virtual machines. vSphere client is installed on the client machine (e.g. Administrator’s laptop). The vSphere
client is used from client machine to connect to ESXi server and do management tasks. So now what is vCenter? Why we
need it? Try cloning existing virtual machine using just a vSphere client without vCenter server.
vCenter server is similar to vSphere client but it’s a server with more power. vCenter server is installed on Windows
Server or Linux Server. VMware vCenter server is a centralized management application that lets you manage virtual
machines and ESXi hosts centrally. vSphere client is used to access vCenter Server and ultimately manage ESXi servers.
vCenter server is compulsory for enterprises to have enterprise features like vMotion, VMware High Availability,
VMware Update Manager and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). For example, you can easily clone existing
virtual machine in vCenter server. So vCenter is another important part of vSphere package. You have to buy vCenter
license separately.

The diagram above shows vSphere suite in a more descriptive way. vSphere is a product suite, ESXi is a hypervisor
installed on a physical machine. vSphere Client is installed on laptop or desktop PC and is used to access ESXi Server to
install and manage virtual machines on ESXi server. vCenter server is installed as virtual machine on top of ESXi server.
vCenter server can also be installed on different standalone physical server, but why not virtualize it too right? vCenter
server is a vSphere component which is mostly used in large environment where there are many ESXi servers and dozens
of virtual machines. The vCenter server is also accessed by vSphere client for management purpose. So, vSphere client is
used to access ESXi server directly in small environment. In larger environment, vSphere client is used again to access
vCenter server which ultimately manages ESXi server.

VMware vSphere– Part 1

Interview Questions, VMware vSphere, vSphere Q&A
VMware infrastructure become very large day by day and VMware is keep on integrating new technologies to their
newer vSphere releases. Its becoming quite difficult for VMware newbies to understand the technology and product
completely. This article will answer many questions for VMware beginners about the VMware vSphere product offerings
and features.I have not explained the products and features very deeply but this one line answers will help you on
interviews to keep your answer short and sweet.

1.What are the products included in VMware vSphere 5.5 Bundle ?

 VMware ESXi
 VMware vCenter Server
 VMware vSphere Client and Web Client
 vSphere Update Manager
 VMware vCenter Orchestrator
2.What type of Hyper-visor VMware ESXi is ?
 VMware ESXi is Bare-metal hypervisor. You can directly install on server hardware.

VMware Hypervisor
3.What is the role of VMware vCenter server?

 vCenter provides a centralized management platform and framework for all ESXi hosts and their respective VMs.
vCenter server allows IT administrators to deploy, manage, monitor, automate, and secure a virtual infrastructure in
a centralized fashion. To help provide scalability , vCenter Server leverages a back-end database (Microsoft SQL Server
and Oracle are both supported, among others) that stores all the data about the hosts and VMs.

vCenter Server – Overview

4. Is it possible install vCenter server on Linux hosts ?
 No.But Pre-build vCenter appliance is available in VMware portal which is Linux based.You can import the appliance
as virtual machine.
5.How to update the VMware ESXi hosts with latest patches ?

 We can update the ESXi hosts using VMware Update Manager(VUM). We can use this VUM add-on package on
Windwos based vCenter server and Linux based vCenter server (vCenter appliance)
6.What is the use of VMware vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client ?

 vCenter Server provides a centralized management framework to VMware ESXi hosts.To access vCenter server, you
need vSphere client or vSphere Web client service enabled.

vSphere Client

7.What is the difference between vSphere Client and vSphere web client ?

 vSphere Client is traditional utility which provides user interface to vCenter server. But from VMware vSphere 5
onwards,vSphere web client is a primary interface to manage vCenter server.For vSphere client, you need install
small utility .But vSphere Web client doen’t require any software. You can directly connect using web browser.But still
VUM is managed through vSphere Client .
vSphere Client:
 vSphere Client – Login

vSphere web-client:

vSphere web client

8.What is the use of VMware vCenter Orchestrator ?

 vCneter Orchestrator is used for automation on various vSphere products.

9.What are the features included in VMware vSphere 5.5 ?

 vSphere High Availabitliy (HA)

 vSphere Fault Tolerance
 vSphere vMotion
 vSphere Storage vMotion
 vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
 virtual SAN (VSAN)
 Flash Read Cache
 Storage I/O Control
 Network I/O Control
 vSphere Replication
10.What is the use of vSphere High Availability(HA)? Where it can be applied ?

 VMware vSphere HA minimize the VM’s unplanned downtime by restarting the VM guests on next available server
ESXi node inacase of failure on current ESXI node. VMware HA must be enabled to reduce the VM unplanned
downtime.
 11. Will vSphere HA help on VM failures too ?

 In an order to detect the VM failures, you need to enable VM Failure Monitoring. So that it detects the Disk I/O and
sends the internal heartbeat to check the VM all the time. If the VM is stopped functioning, VM will be restarted
automatically by vSphere HA.
12.What is the use of vMotion ?

 Using vMotion feature,we can move the running VM’s from one ESXi host to another ESXi host without any
downtime. vMotion copies the VM’s in-memory contents to the destination server and freeze the operation on
current ESXi host and resumes the VM’s on remote ESXI node.

VMware vMotion
13.What is the use of Storage vMotion ?

 vMotion is possible only when you have Shared storage like FC-SAN,ISCSI-SAN or NFS. If you want to move the VM
from one datastore to another datastore without any downtime,then you need to perform storage vMotion.
 vMotion and Storage vMotion
Note: You can perform the vMotion and Storage vMotion together without any downtime.
14.Why vMotion feature is not used/can’t use in vSphere HA ?

 vMotion is used for planned migrations and possible only where the source and destination ESXI hosts are running
properly.vSPhere HA is used to reduce the downtime due to failures of physical ESXi hosts.So When the failure
accours on ESXi nodes, there is no time to perform vMotion and can’t be used.
15.Is there any way to prevent the VM’s unplanned downtime using vSphere HA ?

 Yes.You can prevent the unplanned downtime using vSphere falut tollerance along with vSphere HA.
16.How the vSphere Fault tolerance(FT) works ?

 Using vLockstep technology , vSphere FT maintains the mirrored secondary VM on different ESXi physical host that is
kept in lockstep with the primary.So when the primary ESXi node goes down due to hardware issue, secondary VM
will immediately step-in and provide the service. At this point, this VM will become primary and secondary aka
mirrored VM will be created on possible ESXI host to prevent the further ESXi failure.

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

17.What is vSphere DRS(Distributed Resource Scheduler) ? How it works ?
 vSphere DRS is an intelligent frame works which always monitors the cluster nodes health check and performs the
vMotion automatically whenever required. For an example ,if one of the ESXI cluster host memory has been utilized
more than 90% and due to that lot of paging happening on that server. vSphere DRS detects such things in quick time
and moves few VM’s to another ESXi cluster to least-balance the cluster nodes without any downtime by leveraging
vMotion functionality. It applies for high contention for CPU utilization too. So vSphere DRS helps to balance the CPU
& Memory utilization across the ESXi cluster nodes.


Vmware DRS
18. What is vSphere storage DRS ? How it works ?

 vSphere Storage DRS like vSphere DRS but it applies to storage.It helps to balance storage utilization and performance
between data-stores on same ESXi clusters.

`19.What is VSAN ? How it works ?

 VSAN forms the storage pools across the multiple nodes using internal disks and allows you to create a datastores
that spans multiple ESXI hosts. VSAN also protect the data using VM storage profiles and you can configure it
according to your requirement. You need SSD’s(Solid State Drive) to configure VSAN. Click here to learn more about
VSAN.
 VSAN overview
20.What is Flash Read Cache ?

 vSphere 5.5 supports solid state drive through feature called Flash Read Cache.Using Flash Read Cache, you can assign
a caching space to VM’s like how are you assigning like CPU,Memory and other resources to VM’s. Solid state drive
can provide much better that IOPS compare to normal disks.

Flash Read Cache

 21.What is the use of Storage I/O Control in vSphere 5.5 ?
 You can limit the number of IOPS for each VM.
22.What is the use of network I/O control ?
 Its similar to storage I/O control but its controls the VM’s Network bandwidth.
23.What is vSphere Replication?

 It replicates the complete VM from one datacenter to another datacenter on per VM basis Unlike hardware
replication.

vSphere Replication