Chapter 1. Introduction to VMware vSphere

This chapter covers all the basics of the vSphere architecture, virtualization, an introduction to hypervisors, and virtual infrastructure.

We will cover the following topics:

Let us start with understanding the virtualization philosophy. Virtualization is the separation of a resource or request for a service from the underlying physical delivery of that service. In other words, it's an abstraction of the operating system from hardware resources present on your server.

This blend of virtualization provides a layer of abstraction between computing, storage, and network hardware, and the application running on it. This implementation of virtualization is invisible to the end user as there is very little change to the end user experience.

The key benefit of server virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical server and share the same underlying hardware resources. Virtualization has been a part of the IT industry for decades, but in 1998, VMware, Inc. delivered the benefits of virtualization to industry standard x86-based platforms.

There are two approaches to server virtualization:

The following image shows differences between the two major virtualization approaches: