vSphere is VMware's flagship virtualization platform that allows you to virtualize servers, networks, and storage into a software-defined datacenter (SDDC). This section explains the core components and concepts for beginners.
ESXi is the bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly on physical servers. It provides the foundation for running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical host. Learn more about ESXi here.
vCenter Server is the centralized management platform for managing multiple ESXi hosts and clusters. With vCenter, you can configure, automate, and orchestrate your entire virtual infrastructure. Official vCenter Server documentation.
VMs are software-based computers running on top of ESXi. Each VM has virtual CPU, memory, storage, and networking that map to physical resources.
Datastores are logical containers for VM files and ISO images. They can reside on SAN, NAS, iSCSI, NFS, or local disks. VMware vSAN is a popular software-defined storage option integrated with vSphere.
vSphere networking allows creation of virtual switches, distributed switches, VLANs, and NSX integration to provide virtualized network layers. Full VMware Networking documentation.
vSphere supports clustering features like High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and Fault Tolerance (FT) to provide resiliency and load balancing across multiple hosts.
Anyone working as system administrator, IT engineer, cloud specialist, or infrastructure architect will benefit greatly from mastering vSphere technology.
Now that you understand the basics, continue to the vCenter Installation Guide to start deploying your virtual environment.