Virtual compute is a virtual machine (VM) or virtual computer that runs an operating system and applications, similar to a physical computer. VMware ESXi, the hypervisor within the vSphere environment, serves as a platform for running VMs and allows the consolidation of computing resources.

VMs are the building blocks of the CaaS layer within VMware Telco Cloud Platform, so the VMs that host the data plane intensive CNFs must be tuned correctly for high throughput and low latencies. For best practices about VMs within the CaaS layer, see the CaaS Layer section.