VMware ESX / ESXi

Deploy the Most Reliable Production-proven Hypervisor Architectures

 

Virtualize even the most resource-intensive applications with the hypervisor architectures that set the industry standard for reliability, performance and cross-platform support.

VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are “bare-metal” hypervisor architectures, meaning they install directly on top of the physical server and partition it into multiple virtual machines that can run simultaneously, sharing the physical resources of the underlying server. Each virtual machine represents a complete system, with processors, memory, networking, storage and BIOS, and can run an unmodified operating system and applications.

vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture. For this reason, VMware recommends that deployments of vSphere 4.x utilize the ESXi hypervisor architecture.

The functionality and performance of VMware ESXi and ESX hypervisors are the same; the difference between the two hypervisors resides in their architecture and operational management. VMware ESXi is the latest hypervisor architecture from VMware and as of the vSphere 4.1 release, VMware’s recommended best practice when deploying VMware vSphere. It has an ultra thin footprint with no reliance on a general-purpose OS, setting a new bar for security and reliability. The small footprint and hardware-like reliability of VMware ESXi hypervisor architecture enable it to also be available preinstalled on industry standard x86 servers.