topic Re: VMware vSphere in Operating System - VMware

VMware vSphere

Mi77 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:59:28 GMT

Is VMware vSphere a stand alone Server OS that can be installed without an underlying Server OS? Or does the customer needs to install the VMware ESX/ESXi OS in the physical server first before they can install and use vSphere?

Re: VMware vSphere

Joshua Small_2 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:37:04 GMT

vSphere is a marketing term for a series of products.
What your customer will be purchasing and installing is VMWare ESXi, the "Bare metal hypervisor" - fancy terms for "VMWare's OS".

There's no "vSphere" to actually go and install at this point, although if you setup a virtualised data center, you're doing it under vsphere.

Re: VMware vSphere

Mi77 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:46:31 GMT

Thanks Joshua,

So that means we still need to advise the customer to purchase and install the VMware ESX/ESXi rather than telling them to purchase the whole vSphere package, right?

Re: VMware vSphere

Michal Kapalka (mikap) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:22:23 GMT

Thanks Joshua,

So that means we still need to advise the customer to purchase and install the VMware ESX/ESXi rather than telling them to purchase the whole vSphere package, right?

Vsphere is only a version name of ESX/ESXi,

so if you like to have the latest Vmware for virtualisation, you need to buy,

VMware 4 "Vsphere" update1 for example

"VSphere" = something like codename for VmwareESX server version.

more at :

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/

mikap

Re: VMware vSphere

Steven Clementi — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:56:05 GMT

"So that means we still need to advise the customer to purchase and install the VMware ESX/ESXi rather than telling them to purchase the whole vSphere package, right?"

Yes. There are also several different levels of licensing for ESX. Depending upon their needs (I.E. Do they want/need vmotion? HA/DRS?, Distributed vSwitches, etc.)

Steven

Re: VMware vSphere

Mi77 — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:05:38 GMT

Thank you guys, the info above really helped me a lot to respond to an HP only customer :-)

Re: VMware vSphere

Michal Kapalka (mikap) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:50:26 GMT

hi,

so if the information was helpfull for you , you could asign points.

how to do it.

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#33

mikap

Re: VMware vSphere

Rob Buxton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:59:12 GMT

As others have said, vSphere is the product name for version 4 of Vmware's hypervisor set of products.

You can go from free, to a lot of money depending on what you're doing.

ESX or ESXi installs directly onto the hardware. You can do that at no cost and use a client to manage this, create and run virtual guest servers etc.
Where vSphere comes into it's own is the stuff you pay for. For that you need vCenter and licenses for the advanced features. These can provide high availability and dynamic resource sharing.
Try visiting the Vmware site itself to get an idea of the vSphere / ESXi product sets.

Re: VMware vSphere

Gordon Sjodin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:06:43 GMT

ESX/ESXi does not require an underlying server OS. They are basically a modified version of Linux. To utilize all of the features of VMWare such as vmotion you would require multiple ESX hosts connected to shared disk. Vcenter is used to manage this multi host environment. A Vceneter server does require a windows OS to be installed.

Re: VMware vSphere

Mi77 — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:25:22 GMT

Gordon, that info you shared is a homerun. Thank you Sir.