Glossary

The following terms are used throughout this document. This chapter helps you learn and understand the common terminologies for the VMware Edge Compute Stack service.

Terminology	Description
Host	A compute device that has the VMware Edge Compute Stack software installed.
Server	A server is a hardware or virtual hardware that is made up of vendor and model that VMware Edge Compute Stack can be installed on.
GitOps	GitOps is a way of implementing continuous deployment for cloud-native applications. It focuses on a developer-centric experience when operating infrastructure, by using tools that developers are already familiar with, including Git and continuous deployment tools.
Workload	A user deployed application running as a container, VM or, WASM binary.
Manifest	A specification of a Kubernetes API object in JSON or YAML format. A manifest specifies the desired state of an object that Kubernetes maintains when you apply the manifest.
Worker VM	Worker VM or Node: Kubernetes runs workloads by placing containers into pods to run on nodes. A node can be a virtual or physical machine, depending on the cluster. Each node is managed by the control plane and contains the services necessary to run Pods.
Host Group	A set of hosts that share the same Kubernetes label, applied on VMware Edge Compute Stack.
Label	A Kubernetes key-value pair applied to a node. Sometimes, a label is known as a tag.
NIC	Network Interface Controller (Ethernet Controller).
PCI/PCIe/USB	Types of buses that support various kinds of data transfer, I/O.
(Virtual Infrastructure Bundle (VIB)	Packaging format used by VMware ESXi.
Kickstart	A mechanism (and a configuration file) used to automate ESXi installation.
vSwitch	VMware ESXi virtual layer-2 networking object that mimics a physical networking switch.
Port Group	VMware ESXi virtual networking object that is associated with a vSwitch and allows applying specific behavior configuration (for example, bandwidth limitation, traffic isolation, VLAN tagging) as a network policy to each member port (typically connected to a VM).
Management Network Port Group	A special port group that the ESXi system services use and is accessible to virtual administrator to manage the ESXi system. However, it is not accessible to workloads (for example, VMs) running on that ESXi system.
VM Network Port Group	A commonly named port group that is used to connect virtual machines workload running on that ESXi, often exposed to non-admin users or services.