Introducing the VMware vSphere landscape

VMware vSphere is built for infrastructure virtualization. The benefits of this product are as follows:

• Virtualizing x86 systems
• Virtualizing networks
• Virtualizing storage
• Built-in security and High Availability
• Automated monitoring

The VMware vSphere landscape is formed by the following mandatory components. If the infrastructure is designed without any one of these components, it will result in issues such as poor performance, poor user experience, and applications not working. Let's take a look at the components of vSphere in the following table:

Designing these components is highly critical for virtualization success. The following diagram illustrates the associations within each component:

You need to have understood component associations within VMware vSphere. As the next step, start designing essentials before we jump into designing each component. Let's get started with understanding the essentials of designing VMware vSphere. Designing is nothing but assembling and integrating VMware vSphere infrastructure components together to form the baseline for a virtualized datacenter. It has the following benefits:

• Saves power consumption
• Decreases the datacenter footprint and helps towards server consolidation
• Fastest server provisioning
• On-demand QA lab environments
• Decreases hardware vendor dependency
• Aids to move to the cloud
• Greater savings and affordability
• Superior security and High Availability