Components and Services of the vSphere Environment

Starting with vSphere 7.0, the installation and setup of vSphere is simplified to the deployment and upgrade of vCenter Server.

vCenter Server is a preconfigured virtual machine optimized for running the vCenter Server service and the vCenter Server components. The vCenter Server service acts as a central administrator for ESXi hosts.

Components Installed with vCenter Server

vCenter Server is a central administration point for ESXi hosts. The group of components installed when you install vCenter Server include the vCenter Server service, vSphere Client, VMware vSphere^® Auto Deploy™, VMware vSphere^® ESXi™ Dump Collector, VMware vSphere^® Syslog Collector, and vSphere Lifecycle Manager service.

You can use the vSphere Automation API endpoint to access the following services running on vCenter Server.

Content Library

You can use content libraries to share virtual machines, vApps, and other files, such as ISO, OVA, and text files, across the software-defined data center. You can create, share, and subscribe to content libraries on the same vCenter Server instance or on a remote instance. Sharing content libraries promotes consistency, compliance, efficiency, and automation in deploying workloads at scale.

You can also create OVF and VM templates from virtual machines and vApps in hosts, resource pools, and clusters. You can then use the OVF and VM templates to deploy new virtual machines and vApps.

Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can edit the contents of a VM template. You can check out the library item that contains the VM template. After editing the VM template, check in the library item to save the changes to the virtual machine.

Virtual Machine

You can use the vSphere Automation APIs to create, configure, and manage the life cycle of virtual machines in your environment.

Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can also clone, create an instant clone, migrate, register, and unregister a virtual machine.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager

Starting with vSphere 7.0, the life cycle of ESXi hosts and clusters can be managed through the VMware vSphere ^® Lifecycle Manager™ feature. Based on the current state of the hosts in a cluster, you can easily create a desired software specification by using the contents of a software depot. Then you validate the desired software specification and you apply the specification on all hosts in the cluster.

vSphere Tags

With vSphere tags you can attach metadata to vSphere objects, and as a result, make it easier to filter and sort these objects. You can use the vSphere Automation APIs to automate the management of vSphere tags.

vSphere IaaS control plane

Starting with vSphere 7.0, you can enable vSphere IaaS control plane on an existing vSphere cluster in your environment. Create and configure namespaces on the Supervisors to run Kubernetes workloads in dedicated resource pools.