What is the difference between vsphere and esx

Does VMware have additional products that touch the vSphere platform, or are even apart of it? As of vSphere 7, there has been a huge push on Kubernetes. This enhanced functionality falls under of the scope of VMware vSphere. Here is what you see on one of the download pages:. There are currently no longer any supported version of ESX available. You get the idea here, VMware vSphere is the container for all the other core server virtualization components that provide the required functionality that makes up the VMware environment.

When you look at where ESXi fits into vSphere, ESXi is the most basic component of the virtualization stack that allows physical hardware to be abstracted from the running virtual machines. You may be familiar with VMware Workstation and maybe have even ran this on your desktop. However, ESXi is the enterprise server counterpart of VMware Workstation meant to run production servers in your environment.

The ESX variant had a full-blown service console. The ESXi hypervisor provides the core virtualization components to the virtual machines running on the physical host. ESXi provides the core components of the infrastructure services stack including vCompute, vStorage, and vNetworking.

And, to emphasize its importance, you can have virtualization with only the ESXi component. ESX 4. After vSphere 5, only ESXi is available. This comparison based out of the VMware Article. Those VMs are automatically restarted on other hosts which are part of VMware cluster.

There is small downtime during which the system figures out what the host has failed and which are the hosts that are able to start the failed VMs. Those hosts must have enough available capacity in terms of memory or CPU. Once this automatic decision is taken, the VM boots up. The whole process is completely automatic and acts without the admin's intervention. As you can see, the VMware terminology is not so complicated and the difference between ESXi, vSphere or vCenter are not that hard to learn.

We have also some deep dives and how-to articles which are part of the vSphere 6. VMware licensing is quite coherent. While the hypervisor itself is free, with limited functions, it's clearly difficult to put such a host into a production environment without taking a risk of a data loss. The Free ESXi is meant to be used for testing environments only. Only with a reliable and solid backup solution which allows to backup running VMs, it is possible to move workloads into production and say that at any time you can restore if anything goes wrong.

What to do when all your data are encrypted by some crypto-ransomware? The only way, without paying the ransom, is to restore from the backup location.

That's why is important to backup, but also to copy the backed up data to a secondary location. VMware Certification Program vouchers are valid for 12 months from the month purchased. Vouchers are redeemed through third-party testing provider, Pearson VUE. Check VMware learning credits at VMware.