VMware vSphere Design Essentials

The VMware vSphere landscape is formed by the following mandatory components. If the infrastructure is designed without any one of these components, it will result in issues such as poor performance, poor user experience, and applications not working. Let's take a look at the components of vSphere in the following table:

Components	Description
ESXi	This provides a virtualization layer that contains computing, network, and storage resources of the ESXi host into several VMs. We will see more information on designing the management layer in the upcoming chapters.
Management layer	This is nothing but a vCenter that provides a layer as a vital administration point for ESXi hosts associated on your network. We will see more information on designing the management layer in the upcoming chapters.
vCompute	This is nothing but a collection of virtual memory, virtual CPUs, and virtual network interface cards; all these components form vCompute. We will see more information on designing the management layer in the upcoming chapters.
vNetwork	This links VMs to one other within ESXi host, establish the communication between VMs virtual NIC to the physical network, and along with that also provides a communication chancel services for VMkernel services (including NFS, iSCSI, vMotion) We will see more information on designing vNetwork in the upcoming chapters.
vStorage	This is nothing but an application interface layer, which in turn provides an abstraction layer to manage and modify physical storage during implementation. We will see more information on designing vStorage in upcoming sections in this chapter.
Database	This acts a data management point to organize all the configuration data for the VMware vSphere infrastructure. We will see more information on designing databases in upcoming sections in this chapter.

Designing these components is highly critical for virtualization success. The following diagram illustrates the associations within each component:

You need to have understood component associations within VMware vSphere. As the next step, start designing essentials before we jump into designing each component. Let's get started with understanding the essentials of designing VMware vSphere. Designing is nothing but assembling and integrating VMware vSphere infrastructure components together to form the baseline for a virtualized datacenter. It has the following benefits:

Saves power consumption
Decreases the datacenter footprint and helps towards server consolidation
Fastest server provisioning
On-demand QA lab environments
Decreases hardware vendor dependency
Aids to move to the cloud
Greater savings and affordability
Superior security and High Availability

VMware vSphere Design Essentials

By : Swapnil A Kambli, Puthiyavan Udayakumar

VMware vSphere Design Essentials

By: Swapnil A Kambli, Puthiyavan Udayakumar

Overview of this book

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VMware vSphere Design Essentials

Introducing the VMware vSphere landscape