VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x on Dell PowerEdge Systems Installation Instructions and Important Information Guide

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x architecture

vSphere infrastructure consists of the following components:

ESXi

Allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single system.

vCenter server

Monitors and manages the management application of VMs and copies of ESXi. With a vCenter server, you can create, start, stop, and migrate VMs across the entire physical data center. vCenter server is optional, but it is required for advanced management capabilities such as VMware vSphere vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), and High Availability (HA).

vCenter server database

Stores all the configuration data about a VMware infrastructure environment. It is recommended that you use a production database such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle for the vCenter Server database.

vSphere Web Client

Shares the functionality of the core administrative interface starting from ESXi 5.1, with the vSphere client. vSphere client can be launched from Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, without requiring a specific client installation.

With VMware ESXi 8.0, vSphere client can be accessed using two options:

• vSphere Web Client FLEX or Flash
• vSphere client HTML5

vSphere client can be accessed using vSphere client HTML5 with 7.x. and later.

vSphere client

Requires an ESXi host to manage, by directly connecting to it or through vCenter Server. It can be installed on a system running a supported Windows operating system. vSphere Web Client can replace the vSphere Client for future releases. The vSphere Web Client enables you to connect to a vCenter Server system to manage an ESXi host or multiple hosts through a browser.

VMware Host Client

The embedded VMware Host Client is an HTML5-based client that has a similar interface to the vSphere Web Client used to manage single ESXi hosts. You use the VMware Host Client to conduct emergency management when vCenter Server is temporarily unavailable.

Virtual Machine datastore

Stores VM configuration and virtual disk files. The VM storage can either be internal local storage to the ESXi or external storage. Multiple ESXi systems share VM storage. Advanced features such as HA and DRS require that the hard disk drive and configuration files are stored on the external shared storage.

The following figure shows the different components of vSphere.