Based on a proven and comprehensive software-defined stack including VMware vSphere®, VMware VMware vSAN®, VMware vSphere® IaaS control plane, and VMware Aria Suite™, vSphere Foundation provides a set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, operations management, and container management.
Components of vSphere Foundation
The components of vSphere Foundation provide a platform for running both virtualized and containerized workloads on top of VMware virtual infrastructure software.
| vSphere Foundation Component | Description |
|---|---|
| vSphere | vSphere uses virtualization to transform individual data centers into aggregated computing infrastructures that include CPU, storage, and networking resources. VMware vSphere manages these infrastructures as a unified operating environment and provides you with the tools to administer the data centers that participate in that environment. The two core components of vSphere are ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the virtualization platform where you create and run virtual machines and virtual appliances. vCenter Server is the service through which you manage multiple hosts connected in a network and pool host resources. |
| vSAN | vSAN aggregates local or direct-attached data storage devices to create a single storage pool that is shared across all hosts in the vSAN cluster. Using vSAN removes the need for external shared storage, and simplifies storage configuration and virtual machine provisioning. Built-in policies allow for flexibility in data availability. |
| vSphere IaaS control plane | You can deploy and operate the compute, networking, and storage infrastructure for vSphere IaaS Control Plane, also called Workload Management. vSphere IaaS Control Plane transforms vSphere to a platform for running Kubernetes workloads natively on the hypervisor layer. When enabled on a vSphere cluster, vSphere IaaS Control Plane provides the capability to run Kubernetes workloads directly on ESXi hosts and to create upstream Kubernetes clusters within dedicated resource pools. |
| VMware Aria Suite | You can then deploy and manage the life cycle of the VMware Aria Suite products (VMware Aria Operations for Logs, and VMware Aria Operations) by using VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle. VMware Aria Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the heterogeneous data center and the hybrid cloud. It is designed to deliver and manage infrastructure and applications to increase business agility while maintaining IT control. It provides the most comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure. |
Deployment Overview for vSphere Foundation
An example deployment flow starts with the virtual infrastructure that will run the management components:
- Install ESXi, deploy vCenter Server, and enable vSAN on your clusters.
- Deploy the VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Operations for Logs for monitoring your environment.
- Deploy VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator for a library of workflows for creating and running automated, processes to manage VMware products and third-party technologies.
After the management components, you can continue with adding infrastructure for customer workloads, registering this infrastructure to the VMware Aria Suite components.
Setting Up Functionality across the vSphere Foundation Platform
For authentication from a central external identity provider, you can configure VMware Single Sign-On across all components of vSphere Foundation. See Configuring VMware Single Sign-On in vSphere Foundation.
