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2020-06-14 Vmware

Vcenter Vs Vsphere Esxi

What is the difference between VCenter and VSphere ESXI?#

VMWare Vsphere Esxi#

  • Installed on bare metal like an operating system
  • Type 1 hypervisor - purely for running virtual machines
  • Basic creation of VM’s and networking
  • vSphere management interface provides access (web based)
  • No GUI - when physical machine boots
  • Can only manage a single host at a time
  • Good if you aren’t worried about backups and high availability

VCenter#

  • Deployed as a virtual machine on top of an esxi host - vcenter server appliance
  • Manage many esxi hosts at a time
  • Flash and HTML management interface
  • Advanced features: vm cloning, HA, fault tolerance
  • fluid movement between hosts
  • Automatically picks up underlying info and vms in esxi hosts
  • vMotion is movement from one host to another
  • Create templates for fast provisioning
  • DRS - distributed resource scheduling (creates on host with least resources)
  • distributed vswitches

Basically when you want to scale up and provide more high availability and other services use vCenter

Minimum specs:

  • 2 CPU Cores
  • 4GB RAM
  • 64-bit

Source#