Deployment Guide

6 ESXi Deployment Guide
If you have ordered ESXi hypervisor-based vSphere Essentials Plus, Standard,
Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus, replace the Single Server edition license key
with the purchased one.
vSphere 4 Architecture Overview
Figure 1. vSphere Components
vSphere infrastructure consists of the following components:
• ESXi — Allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on
a single system.
•
vCenter Server — Runs on Windows-based operating systems and
monitors and manages Virtual Machines (VMs) and copies of ESXi.
With vCenter Server, you can create, start, stop, and migrate VMs across
the entire physical data center. vCenter Server is optional and is required
PowerEdge System as ESXi Host
vSphere Client/vSphere CLI
vCenter Server
Ethernet Fabric
vCenter Server Database
License
Server
Storage
Interconnect Fabric