Book Image

The Complete VMware vSphere Guide

By : Mike Brown, Hersey Cartwright, Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, Paolo Valsecchi
Book Image

The Complete VMware vSphere Guide

By: Mike Brown, Hersey Cartwright, Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, Paolo Valsecchi

Overview of this book

vSphere 6.7 is the latest release of VMware's industry-leading virtual cloud platform. By understanding how to manage, secure, and scale apps with vSphere 6.7, you can easily run even the most demanding of workloads. This Learning Path begins with an overview of the features of the vSphere 6.7 suite. You'll learn how to plan and design a virtual infrastructure. You'll also gain insights into best practices to efficiently configure, manage, and secure apps. Next, you'll pick up on how to enhance your infrastructure with high-performance storage access, such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) and Persistent memory. The book will even guide you in securing your network with security features, such as encrypted vMotion and VM-level encryption. Finally, by learning how to apply Proactive High Availability and Predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), you'll be able to achieve enhanced computing, storage, network, and management capabilities for your virtual data center. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to build your own VMware vSphere lab that can run high workloads. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: VMware vSphere 6.7 Data Center Design Cookbook - Third Edition by Mike Brown and Hersey Cartwright Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7 - Second Edition by Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Karel Novak, and Paolo Valsecchi
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

The components of a virtual machine

A VM behaves in the same way as a physical computer, but it's a software computer that runs an OS and applications supported by the host's provided resources. A VM supports all the same functionalities and devices as a physical machine, but it's easier to manage and more secure.

Typically, a VM can be configured to run on ESXi hosts, data centers, clusters, or resource pools, and includes three main components:

  • Virtual and hardware resources
  • Virtual machine tools
  • Guest operating system

Virtual hardware

When you create a VM, the ESXi host presents the hardware as a specific set of resources to the VM. The hardware type provided by the configuration wizard is selected by VMware...